Open the way to the artificial ovary – Biotech

It will take several more years for the artificial ovary to become a reality, but the first step was made and is certainly promising: for the first time the structures surrounding immature oocytes (ovarian follicles ) have been isolated and cultured on ovarian scaffolds in private from its cells, until they can function . "It's a proof of principle to preserve the fertility of women who have to deal with treatments that could compromise it," said Susanne Pors, research coordinator at Rigshospitalet's laboratory of reproductive biology. in Copenhagen. . The result was presented at the Congress of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (Eshre) underway in Barcelona.

However, Pors noted, "removing cells from frozen ovarian tissue and transferring vital follicles to them could avoid the risk of reintroducing potentially present malignant cells into the original tissue ". The experiments were done with ovarian tissue taken by women who had wanted to keep it before facing cancer therapy. The first step was to remove the cells present in the tissue by means of a chemical process for three days

In this way, one got a kind of scaffold in which they were follicles reimplanted . "We saw that the follicles were able to repopulate the tissue," said Pors, referring to experiments in test tubes. " The artificial ovary was then obtained transferred to a mouse demonstrating to support egg growth with a very low risk of cell transfer The next step – said the researcher – will be how to develop the ovary obtained with this technique, with observation periods of up to 6 months. "As for the first human tests," they will still take a lot, a lot of years. "