Capable of growing into anything NDY WALKER, MIDLAND FERTILITY SERVICES/ SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

The most versatile stem cells ever created could enable researchers to better understand the biological mechanisms behind many failed early pregnancies.

Pentao Liu of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, and his team developed the stem cells from cells taken from very young mouse embryos. They gave these cells a cocktail of chemicals to prevent them from maturing, trapping them in a very young, primordial state.

The team has named them “expanded-potential stem cells” (EPSCs), because – unlike any other stem cells in the lab – they are able to create placenta and yolk sac tissue. These tissues are essential for supporting embryonic and fetal development, and many pregnancies fail because of unknown problems with these tissues.


Liu’s team also found that the same chemical cocktail can rewind other types of stem cell back to the same primordial state as EPSCs. This means that researchers should be able to turn embryonic stem cells (which are taken from older embryos) and induced pluripotent stem cells (which are created from mature cells from skin or elsewhere) into EPSCs. “We can erase all memories in these cells and take them back to the equivalent of a blank piece of paper,” says Liu.

“This is very exciting research that lays the foundation for generating EPSCs from human embryos,” says Jan Brosens of the University of Warwick. “Such a resource would enable us to study how the developing embryo could be protected from an adverse womb environment and potentially lead to new treatments to prevent recurrent miscarriage.”

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature24052

Read more: Getting to grips with the placenta’s real health benefits