Nicolas Rivron is a developmental and stem cells biologist and a tissue engineer. He leads the laboratory for blastoid development and implantation at the Institute for Molecular Biotechnologies, from the Austrian Academy of Science. His laboratory formed blastoids, a model of the complete preimplantation conceptus generated solely from mouse and then human stem cells (Nature 2018, Nature 2021). This embryo model recapitulates aspects of cell fate specification, morphogenesis, and implantation in utero (mouse blastoids) and in vitro using endometrium organoids (human blastoids).
His laboratory investigates the inter-species variations in the principles of positional information and self-organization that shape the mammalian embryo for implantation. Long term, this will eventually allow tackling global health problems of fertility decline, family planning, and the developmental origin of health and diseases.