An artificial ovary that can also grow immature eggs into a fertilizable cell fit for implantation that could perhaps let women become mothers after fertility-destroying cancer treatment, according to scientists.
Researchers have demonstrated the world’s first working “bio-engineered” human ovary in of course early animal trials.
As of now, women will indeed have eggs frozen before chemotherapy or radiotherapy, which can also destroy the viability of the cells.
Prepubertal girls or women who do need urgent treatment before they produce eggs, do rely on ovarian tissue, which does contain thousands of immature eggs in fluid-filled sacs known as follicles, that are to be preserved rather than transplanting it after treatment.
Fertility ‘breakthrough’ as human eggs grown in the lab for the first time
There is indeed a risk of any cancerous cells remaining in preserved tissue, re-implantation that could be deemed too risky.
The Danish technique does offer a way to avoid this, and also potentially does improve on IVF as well as other techniques as more potential eggs could indeed be preserved and would also develop naturally if they can be re-implanted.
It has also been observed that the immature eggs and tissue scaffold could reintegrate and also survive in this scaffold, and then it could then be grafted into a living host.
Theoretically, eggs would indeed begin to mature and get released each month in line with the hormone cues of one’s menstrual cycle.
In fact, this happens to be the first time that isolated human follicles have survived in a de-cellularized human scaffold and, as a proof-of-concept; it could indeed offer a new strategy in fertility preservation without risk of malignant cell re-occurrence.
Independent doctors do claim that it was rather “groundbreaking” work, and although the process now does need to be refined and also shown to be safe in humans, it will take several years.
The ability to rather successfully create a ‘new ovary’, by removing any tissue that might also potentially reintroduce cancer and fashioning a scaffold on which to grow the egg-containing follicles, does allow the re-implantation of a ‘safe’ ovary, with the potentiality to successfully restore fertility.
If this happens to be rather effective, it does offer huge advantages over IVF as well as egg freezing.
This is so as potentially these small pieces of tissue do have thousands of eggs and clearly, if it does work, there is also the advantage of getting pregnant in an old-fashioned way.
No doubt one is yet some years away from that, and so IVF treatment in Hyderabad and egg-freezing is here as of now and will be with us for no doubt several years, but if this works it has dramatic potential.
Fertility issues are indeed of much concern to every married couple who is aspiring to have a child. New techniques are adopted to ensure childbearing is an easy technique and one can thus fulfill one’s desire to have a child.
