Science is full of acronyms. There are days where it feels like you need a decoder ring just to understand a simple sentence. A recent study found that between 1950 and 2019 researchers used more than 1.1 million unique acronyms in scientific papers. There’s even an acronym for three letter acronyms. It’s TLAs. Which of course has one more letter than the thing it stands for.

I only mention this because I just learned a new acronym, but this one could help change the way we are able to study causes of infertility. The acronym is IVG or in vitro gametogenesis and it could enable scientists to create both sperm and egg, from stem cells, and grow them in the lab. And now scientists in Japan have done just that and allowed these fertilized eggs to then develop into mice.

The study, published in the journal Science, was led by Dr. Katsuhiko Hayashi of Kyushu University in Japan. Dr. Hayashi is something of a pioneer in the field of IVG. In the past his team were the first to produce both mouse sperm, and mouse eggs from stem cells. But they ran into a big obstacle when they tried to get the eggs to develop to a point where they were ready to be fertilized.

Over the last five years they have worked to find a way around this obstacle and, using mouse embryonic stem cells, they developed a process to help these stem cell-generated eggs mature to the point where they were viable.

In an article in STAT News Richard Anderson, Chair of Clinical Reproductive Science at the University of Edinburgh, said this was a huge achievement: “It’s a very serious piece of work. This group has done a lot of impressive things leading up to this, but this latest paper really completes the in vitro gametogenesis story by doing it in a completely stem-cell-derived way.”

The technique could prove invaluable in helping study infertility in people and, theoretically, could one day lead to women struggling with infertility to be able to use their own stem cells to create eggs or men their own sperm. However, the researchers say that even if that does become possible it’s likely a decade or more away.

While the study is encouraging on a scientific level, it’s raising some concerns on an ethical level. Should there be limits on how many of these manufactured embryos that a couple can create? Can someone create dozens or hundreds of these embryos and then sift through them, using genetic screening tools, to find the ones that have the most desirable traits?

One thing is clear, while the science is evolving, bioethicists, scholars and the public need to be discussing the implications for this work, and what kinds of restraints, if any, need to be applied before it’s RFPT (ready for prime time – OK, I made that one up.)