CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Talk about a potentially major game changer for a woman and her eggs.
For the first time ever, researchers have proven the existence of egg-producing stem cells in the ovaries of humans.
The breakthrough throws open the door -- albeit years down the road -- to the possibility that women in their 30s and 40s, whose fertility is on the decline, could replenish their dwindling egg supplies.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston used a new technique to pull stem cells from the ovaries of six women in their 20s and 30s whose ovaries had been removed as part of gender reassignment surgery.
When grown in the lab, those stem cells produced oocytes, which are immature egg cells that have not yet developed into an egg.
A video on the journal's web site does a good job of describing the research in layman's terms.
"These cells, when maintained outside the body, are more than happy to make eggs on their own," Jonathan Tilly, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and chief of research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Vincent Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, said in a video interview.
"And if we can guide the process correctly, I think it opens up the chance that sometime in the future we might get to the point of having an unlimited source of human eggs. . . . It would rewrite, essentially, human assisted reproduction," he said.
The findings of the research team led by Tilly are in the March issue of the journal Nature Medicine.
Fertility specialists view these findings not only as exciting but also as a complete paradigm shift. And rightly so, since conventional wisdom has long dictated that a woman is born with all of the eggs she'll ever have. And when they're gone, they're gone.
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Stem cells might one day form human eggs, research finds