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Human Egg Cells Developed From Ovarian Tissue Samples

Accepted submission by takyon at 2018-02-09 12:09:46
Science

Scientists have coaxed primordial follicles [wikipedia.org] from human ovarian tissue into creating apparently mature egg cells [sciencemag.org], although they have not been fertilized:

In an advance that could lead to new fertility treatments, researchers have coaxed immature human egg cells to fully develop in the lab for the first time. Still unclear is whether the resulting eggs, which reached maturity in just 22 days, compared with 5 months in the body, are normal and whether they can combine with sperm to make a healthy embryo.

The feat nonetheless is "extraordinarily important," says Kyle Orwig, a stem cell biologist at the Magee-Womens Research Institute at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania who was not involved in the new work. "It has real potential for application," he adds. "We already have the patients."

Those patients include women who have gone through chemotherapy, which can damage eggs and cause infertility. Girls with cancer who haven't hit puberty don't yet produce mature eggs that can be frozen, so some choose to preserve a small piece of ovarian tissue, which can later be placed back in the body to start making eggs. But that's a risky choice in some cases, because the transplant could reintroduce the cancer with the cells. If the new process is perfected, these women could instead rely on the tissue they saved as girls to generate eggs for in vitro fertilization.

[...] In the new work, Telfer and her collaborators completed the whole developmental cycle. They took small samples from the ovaries of 10 women undergoing elective caesarian sections, and isolated 87 follicles, which they let develop in a soup of nutrients. Then came a new step: They carefully extracted the fragile, immature eggs and some surrounding cells from the follicles, and allowed them to further mature on a special membrane in the presence of more growth-supporting proteins. In the end, just nine of these eggs passed the final test for maturity [oup.com] [open, DOI: 10.1093/molehr/gay002] [DX [doi.org]]—they were able to divide and halve their chromosomes so they were ready to join with sperm during fertilization, the researchers reported online 30 January in Molecular Human Reproduction.

The next step would be to create the primordial follicles from stem cells or skin cells.

Also at BBC [bbc.com] and The Guardian [theguardian.com].

Related: Mice Created from Artificially Developed Embryos [soylentnews.org]
Fertile Mouse Eggs Created Using Stem Cells [soylentnews.org]


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