Lab-Matured Eggs May Give Childhood Cancer Survivors a Chance at Children
Fertility research being done in Israel is giving new hope to young cancer patients who hope to have children one day. For the first time, doctors have extracted eggs from young female cancer patients and successfully matured them in a laboratory.
Once the removed eggs completed the hormone-induced maturation process in the lab, they were frozen and stored for later use.
The toxicity of chemotherapy treatments used to combat cancer can often render female patients infertile, damage ovaries, or reduce the number of eggs they produce. Since the prognosis for surviving many childhood cancers is relatively high, this new advancement could provide future girls a way to overcome their disease and still preserve their ability to conceive children later in life.
The study was conducted at the Hadassah University Hospital in Israel and included patients between the ages of 5 and 20 years old.
Findings from the study were presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Lyon, France, but the final success of the project will be impossible to evaluate until the eggs are thawed and fertilized. According to the lead researcher on the project, Dr Ariel Revel:
“We will only know the final chapter of this story in about 10 years, when we hope to close the circle of this research.”
Source: Hadassah Medical Organization
Related Articles: Associated Press; The Jerusalem Post
Enclosures: National Library of Medicine Chemotherapy Tutorial
Tags: artificial insemination; fertility treatments; oocytes; oophorectomy; pregnancy
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