Comment by ravitation
5 years ago
From the MIT Technology Review article...
>Some researchers sensed that the young entrepreneurs were in over their heads. The science of in vitro gametogenesis is dominated by a small cadre of university research groups who’ve been working on the problem for years. “When I talked to them, they had no clue, absolutely no clue, how to start a project,” says Albertini. “They were asking me what kind of equipment to buy. It was ‘How would you know if you made an egg? What would it look like?’”
To be honest, this was my first thought. I don't work directly in the field, but in a tangentially related field at an R1 research university, and I read through their research team and definitely got the sense that they were... certainly ambitious.
Obviously, I'm always in favor of more research in transformative technologies, in mostly whatever form that takes; but I do wonder about venture capital as the model for this type of research specifically.
Oocytes are one of the most difficult cells to engineer as well... The mitochondria in Oocytes are turned off from birth because otherwise reactive oxygen species will damage the mtDNA. One would have to use CRISPR to re-build the mtDNA, use telomerase / crispr to get the telomeres to exactly the right length, fix any mutations within the genome, etc. There are many many technical challenges to overcome, requiring further development of multiple immature technology stacks, and the bar is much higher than it is for mice since you would want a baby with the cellular metabolism profile of a 30y/old.