Stem cells would be capable of producing new eggs

WASHINGTON (AP) – medical for 60 years, thought that women were born with all the eggs that would have. Now Harvard scientists defy this dogma and claim to have discovered that the ovaries of young women are very unusual stem cells capable of producing new eggs.

If it is confirmed the report on Sunday published in the journal Nature Medicine, take advantage of these stem cells could someday give better treatment to women who are infertile by disease or simply because aging.

“Our current view of the ovarian age is incomplete.” “You have much more in the story that simply let escape a fixed collection of eggs little by little,” said principal investigator Jonathan Tilly, of the Massachusetts General Hospital of Harvard, who long has followed these cells in a series of controversial studies.

Tilly’s previous work provoked fierce scepticism and independent experts asked to be careful with the more recent findings.

A key step is to see if other laboratories can verify the work. If you do, would take years of research further to learn how to use those cells, said Teresa Woodruff, head of preservation of fertility in the Faculty of medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg.

However, an investigation could thus help to disperse some of the most enduring mysteries that surround how it formed and mature human eggs.

For a long time, scientists were taught that the mammalian born with a finite supply of cells called oocytes, depleting when they reach middle age oocyte. Tilly first rejected this idea in 2004 reported that the ovaries of adult rat protects some stem cells capable of producing eggs. The scientist said that you recently, a laboratory in China and another in United States also found these cells in mice.

There is still a long way to show that these eggs will mature and will be viable, said David Albertini, director of the Center for reproductive sciences of the University of Kansas.

Tilly argues that using stem cells to grow eggs in the lab one day will help to preserve the fertility of cancer patients. Today, in various laboratories as the Woodruff, they freeze parts of ovaries in girls before being subjected to radiation or chemotherapy. And study how to mature the eggs that can be used in in vitro fertilization when girls grow.