“All animal experiments were performed in accordance with the ethics guidelines of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health. Human–mouse chimera and human blastoid experiments were approved and followed up by the Animal Care and Use Committee and Human Subject Research Ethics Committee under license numbers IACUC2016012 and GIBH-IRB2020-034, respectively, of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health. These committees comprise experts in different fields (including scientists working on development and other disciplines, and non-scientists (doctors and lawyers)), and they evaluated the rationale of the experiment plan, origins and consent of human materials and the qualification of the investigators. Several of these experts followed the study until completion. Both experiments followed relevant international regulations, including the 2016 Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation released by the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). A specialized review process was activated in the human–mouse chimera experiments to assess whether the degree of functional integration was sufficiently high to raise concerns that the nature of the chimeric animal would be substantially changed. Human blastoid experiments were subjected to an embryo research oversight process. Several of these experts followed the study until completion. We have consent forms for all iPS cells generated in our laboratory. For the chimera experiments, we used the HN10-DsRed ES cell line, which were established by Hainan Medical University, China. We performed a TPRX1 –EGFP knock-in into HN10-DsRed ES cells, as H9 ES cells cannot be used for interspecies chimeras. All human PSC lines were used anonymized”.
“All animal experiments were performed in accordance with the ethics guidelines of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health. Teratoma experiments were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health under license number IACUC:2021002. Human blastoid experiments were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health under license number GIBH-IRB2020-034. Human–mouse chimera experiments were part of work in a team grant of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA16030502). The team in this grant had ethical clearance for work on human-mouse chimeras (license numbers IACUC:2019037 approved by Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health and GIBH-IRB2019-020 approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health). The license number for performing embryo-complementation experiments at the facility of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health was IACUC:2016012 (approved by Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine). Our research work on human-mouse chimeras was very rigorously overseen on a quarterly basis by a large and independent panel of experts from different disciplines including non-scientific at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Special care by the reviewing experts was put onto assessing whether the degree of functional integration was sufficiently high to raise concerns that the nature of the chimeric animal would be substantially changed. Several of these experts followed the study until completion. All experiments adhered to the relevant international regulations, including the 2016 Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation released by the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). Human blastoid experiments were subjected to an embryo research oversight process. Several of these experts followed the study until completion. We have consent forms for all iPSCs generated in our laboratory. For the chimera experiments, we used the HN10-DsRed ESC line, which were established by Hainan Medical University, China. We performed a TPRX1–EGFP knock-in into HN10-DsRed ESCs, as H9 and H1 ESCs cannot be used for interspecies chimeras. All human PSC lines were used anonymized”.