Hello! I’m Jo Marchant, Nature’s news editor, and I’m here in Prague for the 22nd annual meeting of ESHRE, the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. It’s a huge and wide-ranging meeting — I’m told there are over 6000 delegates here, including infertility specialists, embryologists, geneticists, stem cell scientists and developmental biologists.
Today is the first day of the meeting proper, but I’ll post about that in a bit. First, an update on the latest in stem-cell research. Yesterday I attended a pre-congress course on stem-cell derivation and therapy organised by Anna Veiga of the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, and Luca Gianaroli of the Sismer Reproductive Medicine Unit in Bologna. I was there to grab audio interviews with as many of the speakers as possible, asking them about the state of stem-cell research and its future potential for a special podcast on stem cells that Nature is putting together. The podcast is to run alongside a stem cell supplement that’s going in the 29 June issue of Nature. That podcast will also include a studio debate and interviews with some of the authors of the Nature articles, and it’ll be available here from late on 28 June. My stuff will be edited down into a short package for that podcast, and in the meantime you can listen to a fuller version of some of the interviews I did here .
The first interview is with Alan Trounson of Monash University in Melbourne. He was a pioneer of IVF technology, and is now a leading stem-cell researcher. He told me how excited he is about his own work using stem cells to treat respiratory disease, and about how he believes that adult stem cell therapies will help pave the way for treatments using embryonic stem cells.
The second interview is with Stephen Minger, of King’s College London. He is one of a select handful of researchers who have a licence to derive embryonic stem cell lines in the UK. He’s using embryos rejected from IVF treatment after pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). He said he’d like to try somatic cell nuclear transfer (or therapeutic cloning, where stem-cell lines are derived from a cloned human embryo, with the ultimate aim of creating lines that are matched to a patient’s own cells). But he favours the idea of starting off by using non-human eggs for the cloning, until the efficiency is high enough to justify using donated human eggs.
Finally I spoke to course organiser Luca Gianaroli. He told me how he believes one of the most exciting things about stem-cell research at the moment is what it’s telling researchers about basic embryo physiology — which is crucial for infertile couples of course, as well as those carrying certain genetic diseases.