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It will take many years for the artificial ovaries to become a reality, but the first step has already been made and looks promising: for the first time the structures surrounding the immature oocytes (ovarian follicles) have been isolated and pushed a Scaffold ovarian tissue deprived of their cells, so that they can function.
"It is a proof of principle to preserve the fertility of women who have to deal with treatments that could put them in danger," he said. research coordinator Susanne Pors from Rigshospitalet Reproductive Biology Laboratory in Copenhagen
The result was presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) Congress being held in Barcelona
The goal is to enable women undergoing cancer treatment to maintain their fertility in conditions of safety. [19659003] Currently the ovarian tissue is preserved before the treatments and frozen to be reimplanted and the Pors research group is one of the pioneers in this field, with ovarian tissue of 1100 patients preserved over the last 20 years, including 115 defrosted and transplanted in 90 women
However, Pors noted, "removing cells from frozen ovarian tissue and transferring vital follicles could avoid the risk of reintroducing potentially present malignant cells into the original tissue."
The experiments were performed with ovarian tissue taken by women who wanted to save it before facing cancer therapy.
The first step was to remove the cells present in the tissue by means of a chemical process that lasts three days. In this way, we got a sort of scaffold in which the follicles were reimplanted
"We saw that the follicles were able to repopulate the tissue with cells," says Pors, referring to the experiments performed in a test tube. Later, the artificial ovary thus obtained was transferred to a mouse, proving to be able to support the growth of ova, with a very reduced risk for the transfer of malignant cells.
"The next step," said the researcher, "will be to understand how the ovary develops with this technique, with observation periods of up to 6 months." Regarding the first human tests, "it will take many years," he said
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