China News Service, Beijing, March 5 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's professional academic journal "Nature Medicine" recently published a stem cell research paper stating that cells collected from amniotic fluid samples can generate a variety of different tissue types. of organoids without the need to terminate the pregnancy.

These organoids may provide a means to understand late pregnancy development and contribute to the study of congenital malformations.

　　According to the paper, organoids are three-dimensional models made from human stem cells that resemble fetal tissue.

Current methods of obtaining organoids for pregnancy modeling, which are mostly obtained from postmortem fetal tissue, are typically only available within 20-22 weeks after conception, which limits the study of late pregnancy development.

　　In this study, co-corresponding authors Mattia Francesco Maria Gerli and Paolo De Coppi of University College London, UK, together with colleagues and collaborators, evaluated epithelial cells collected from human amniotic fluid taken from 12 pregnancies. between 16 and 34 weeks).

Using single-cell sequencing, they characterized the properties of these cells and identified and isolated epithelial cells of fetal gastrointestinal, kidney- and lung-derived origin.

To explore whether these cells could be used to generate organoids, the authors cultured the cells and observed them begin to proliferate and self-organize into three-dimensional organoids, visible within 2 weeks.

　　The cells were found to form tissue-specific native fetal organoids, namely the small intestine, kidney and lung, and display functional characteristics of the source tissue.

The authors were able to use this technique to generate lung organoids from amniotic fluid and tracheal fluid cells from fetuses with congenital diaphragmatic hernia that reproduce some of the characteristics of the disease.

　　The authors believe their findings demonstrate an alternative method of generating fetal organoids that eliminates the need for pregnancy termination, resolves long-standing ethical concerns and could be used to study late pregnancy.

　　They conclude that this approach may provide an opportunity to autologously derive fetal native organoids during pregnancy, which could aid in the development of advanced prenatal models and personalized therapies, and could help improve parental counseling.

However, they also cautioned that further research is needed to verify the translational impact of these findings.

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