Carissa Wong in Nature:
Scientists have created an infant ‘chimaeric’ monkey by injecting a monkey embryo with stem cells from a genetically distinct donor embryo1. The resulting animal is the first live-born chimaeric primate to have a high proportion of cells originating from donor stem cells.
The finding, reported today in Cell, opens the door to using chimaeric monkeys, which are more biologically similar to humans than are chimaeric rats and mice, for studying human diseases and developing treatments, says stem-cell biologist Miguel Esteban at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou, a co-author of the study. But the monkey chimaera had to be euthanized when it was only ten days old because of hypothermia and breathing difficulties, highlighting the need for further optimization of the approach and raising ethical concerns, say researchers.
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