Could post menopausal women have babies? Study says yes!
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By Maria Cendejas
Researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital say they have extracted stem cells from human ovaries and made them generate egg cells. If they confirm it, it might provide a new source of eggs for treating infertility, though scientists say its too early to tell if it works, according to New York Times.
Women are born with a complement of egg cells that last throughout life. The ability to isolate stem cells from eggs could be refined so that it would help not only with fertility but also with biologists’ understanding of how drugs and nutrition affect the egg cells.
The new research led by the biologist Jonathan L. Tilly and his team, was based on on a special protein found to mark the surface of reproductive cells like eggs and sperm. Using a cell-sorting machine that can separate out the marked cells, they obtained reproductive cells from a mouse ovaries and showed that the cells would generate viable egg cells that could be fertilized to produce embryos.
At the Saitama Medical Center in Japan, they then applied the same method to human ovaries donated by women who were undergoing sex reassignment. As with the mice, the team was able to retrieve reproductive cells that produced immature egg cells when grown in the laboratory.
When the egg cells were injected into the mice, it generated follicles, - the ovarian structure in which eggs are formed and some follicles had a single set of chromosomes, a signature of eggs and sperm.
The research was published in the journal of Nature Medicine
Dr. Tilly and his colleagues said that their work opens up “a new field in human reproductive biology that was inconceivable less than 10 years ago and that access to the new cells will make possible novel forms of fertility preservation.”
In repsonse to the study news, an expert on female reproduction at the Kansas University Medical Center David Albertini said, “The report is a real technological tour de force. Its not yet clear whether the procedure yielded real egg cells that could be used in human fertility. None of the criteria that we in the field use to establish that a cell is a high-quality oocyte are satisfied here.”
Dr. Tilly has long disputed the accepted belief that a woman makes no new egg cells after she is born.
“In 2005 he reported that women possess a hidden reserve of cells in the bone marrow that constantly replenish the ovaries with new eggs. But other researchers have been unable to confirm these results,” Dr. Albertini said.
“The new study is along a completely different line but still should be interpreted with caution,” Dr. Albertini said ,“until other researchers have been able to repeat it a routine verification procedure in research.”
Even if the research is validated, the immediate use of the cells in question would be to generate egg cells for research use, like testing the effects of drugs.
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