Hope for Infertile Couples

It’s about freakin’ time! For every 30-something-year-old woman out there nervously counting her eggs before they’ve hatched, here’s some potentially life-altering news: scientists are as little as five years away from being able to artificially create eggs. (It’s worth noting that the lead researcher on the project is a working woman.)

A team of researchers at Stanford University in California have managed to create primitive human eggs, sperm and the germ cells that make them from embryonic stem cells. The experiment could lead to new treatments for infertility, reports the UK's TimesOnline. 

"Our goal is to understand how you make eggs and sperm," said Renee Reijo Pera, who led the research. “We know almost nothing about human reproductive development, and this gives us a new way to investigate it ... Figuring out the genetic ‘recipe’ needed to develop human germ cells in the laboratory will give us the tools we need to trace what’s going wrong” with infertile couples.

Human eggs and sperm are produced from germ cells in the ovaries or testes, which themselves start to form in early embryos. Scientists are obviously unable both physically and ethically to study how germ cells develop in the womb, and thus how genetic defects or environmental exposures cause fertility problems. So, the only way to do so is to artificially recreate them in the lab.

The Stanford research, which took five years and is published in the journal Nature, identifies several proteins that can help embryonic stem cells form germ cells. The germ cells can now be used to investigate how they give rise to sperm and eggs. The team is now trying to create germ cells using adult cells with embryo-like properties.

If this works, treatment for infertile couples could some day go beyond harvesting eggs for in-vitro fertilization, which depends on having at least some available healthy sperm and eggs. Women, who are born with a finite number of eggs, could theoretically be capable of creating an infinite number of eggs, meaning there would be no time limit on fertility. Talk about women's lib!

Of course, the treatment, which scientists say is still several years away, would have to clear ethical and safety hurdles. Use of artificial gametes in reproduction was banned in Britain just last year.

Photo courtesy of peasap via Flickr.