EMBO Fellowship awarded for pioneering research in early human development
Dr. Maximilian Stötzel has been awarded an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship, a highly competitive program that supports outstanding research in molecular biology. His work will focus on the primitive endoderm, an early embryonic tissue whose regulation and remarkable plasticity may hold the key to improving the success rates of in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
While not directly involved in implantation, proper primitive endoderm differentiation may be the most important determinant of successful pregnancy in IVF. In a study led by Professor Joshua Brickman and Dr. Madeleine Linneberg-Agerholm, researchers showed that in mice, primitive endoderm cells have an extraordinary ability. Even after specification, these cells can reorganize to rebuild an entire early-stage embryo. This remarkable plasticity raises an important question: does the human primitive endoderm have the same capacity?
To address this, Stötzel will investigate how the human primitive endoderm is regulated. His goal is to identify key enhancers – short stretches of DNA that act as switches, turning genes on or off during development – that control the plasticity of these cells. Understanding these regulatory mechanisms could enable researchers to design embryo culture conditions that boosts plasticity in the primitive endoderm, potentially improving embryo development and increasing IVF success rates. Such advances could not only improve fertility treatments but also reduce the stress and financial burden on patients.
By identifying key regulatory factors, Stötzel also aims to refine stem cell models derived from the primitive endoderm. These models offer a closer approximation of early human development, thereby enhancing existing systems by capturing features of the primitive endoderm more accurately. They provide an ethical and scalable platform for studies that cannot be performed on actual embryos—such as exploring how different conditions or compounds influence early developmental processes.
Ultimately, this research will uncover enhancer regulation in early human development with unprecedented detail and could pave the way for new avenues in translational research, offering improved tools to study early development and pregnancy.
This fellowship is funded by EMBO, grant number ALTF 1335-2025.