Reacción a "Laboratory embryo models developed that produce blood cells"

The article develops an interesting model that, I'm convinced, will have a long history in the field of regenerative medicine. However, there is a very dangerous overinterpretation of the results. It's obvious that no one in the field of hematopoiesis has reviewed it, because claiming to have blood stem cells without even attempting a transplant is almost shameful.

It's a breakthrough in possible ways to generate structures that mimic the embryo, and yes, they could represent a future source of transplantation, but we're all working to get these structures to produce cells that can regenerate the hematopoietic system, and this is the real challenge. So far, no one has achieved this. We have published an article in the journal elife where we already obtained these results in mice, but we were unable to demonstrate the presence of stem cells. The same was true in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports by Matthias Lutolf's laboratory.

The present study therefore has many limitations. It's very preliminary work that suggests that, under the right conditions, we'll be able to obtain many cell types, and with further studies, even blood stem cells, but they don't obtain them. It's a shame they don't point out as a limitation of the study that they haven't done transplant trials and that they don't know if these cells are functional.