American scientists have successfully collected eggs from stem cells taken from human ovaries for the first time, which may help cure infertile women.
It is said that women have a given number of eggs when born, which are decreasing as time passes and depleted entirely when menstruation comes to an end.
“Oocyte-producing stem cells exist in the ovaries of adult women and in reality, they get matured to normal, healthy eggs in demonstration” said Jonathan Tilly, reproductive biologist of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, according to news agencies such as the Associated Press and the aAFP.
Dr. Tilly and his team employed the technique of Chinese research team at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, to get stem cells from ovarian tissue in collaboration with professors at Japan’s Saitama Medical University, who were freezing ovaries donated for research by healthy 20-somethings who underwent a sex-change surgery.
His team injected the ovarian stem cells tagged with a green fluorescent marker into a bit of human ovarian tissue, and grafted beneath the skin of mice. After 14 days, scientists saw several eggs-glowing with the green fluorescent marker. It indicated that they originated from the transplanted ovarian stem cells.
“It proved that it is possible to create mature eggs from oocyte-producing stem cells and one day we may supply 'unlimited' human eggs to aid fertility treatment,” Tilly said. “We are planning to run an ovarian stem-cell bank that can be cryogenically frozen and thawed without damage, unlike human eggs.”
The findings were published in the latest journal of Nature Medicine.