A Birth Without An Egg.

A new wave of confidence.

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1. About a decade ago, biologists started to observe that stem cells, left alone in a walled plastic container, will spontaneously self-assemble and try to make an embryo. These structures, sometimes called “embryo models” or embryoids, have gradually become increasingly realistic. In 2022, a lab in Israel grew the mouse version in a jar until cranial folds and a beating heart appeared. At the University of Florida, researchers are now attempting to go all the way. They want to make a live animal. If they do, it wouldn’t just be a totally new way to breed cattle. It could shake our notion of what life even is. “There has never been a birth without an egg,” says Zongliang “Carl” Jiang, the reproductive biologist heading the project. “Everyone says it is so cool, so important, but show me more data—show me it can go into a pregnancy. So that is our goal.” (Source: technologyreview.com, italics mine)

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2. Last week, Moderna and Merck launched a large clinical trial in the UK of a promising new cancer therapy: a personalized vaccine that targets a specific set of mutations found in each individual’s tumor. This study is enrolling patients with melanoma. But the companies have also launched a phase III trial for lung cancer. And earlier this month BioNTech and Genentech announced that a personalized vaccine they developed in collaboration shows promise in pancreatic cancer, which has a notoriously poor survival rate. Drug developers have been working for decades on vaccines to help the body’s immune system fight cancer, without much success. But promising results in the past year suggest that the strategy may be reaching a turning point. (Source: technologyreview.com)