A breakthrough for cancer victims could prevent women becoming infertile after chemotherapy. Most women blasted with toxic drugs to treat their cancer become infertile, but scientists have found for the first time their ovaries could be saved.
Grafting part of a healthy ovary onto one destroyed by chemotherapy was found to help it start working again.
It comes a month after Moaza Al Matrooshi, 24, became the first woman in the world to give birth after having her ovary removed as a child, frozen and part of it reimplanted.
But despite the excitement over implanted ovarian tissue, it was not known that it could rescue the dying ovary still in the body, triggering it to produce eggs capable of making a baby.
It means women like Miss Al Matrooshi who freeze their ovaries to have a family after beating serious illness may not have to rely on tissue with potentially only a limited number of eggs, which could run out before they become pregnant or complete their family.
Their existing ovary would provide a back-up, according to a study by Duke University in the US in mice. This is thought to be due to signals from the healthy ovarian cells to the damaged ovary to produce more eggs.
Lead researcher Professor Blanche Capel presented the research to the British Fertility Society conference in Edinburgh yesterday.
Speaking afterwards, she said: 'This is the first study to find that grafted ovarian tissue rescues the damaged ovary and causes it to undergo repair.
'It means there is a mechanism to save the ovary, which if we can figure out how it works in people, could mean a better life for a lot of women who have chemotherapy.'
Chemotherapy drugs destroy the follicles, cyst-like structures which feed eggs in the ovary. When they die, women who have had cancer treatment often stop producing eggs and undergo an early menopause.
Miss Al Matrooshi, who was having chemotherapy treatment for a rare blood disorder, had her ovarian tissue frozen when she was nine years old to protect her fertility.
The US study similarly grafted healthy ovarian tissue into 140 mice given chemotherapy drugs, which then started up their damaged ovaries again.
This is known because the scientists used a green fluorescent protein to mark the grafted ovarian cells.
More than half of the mice transplanted with healthy ovarian tissue had babies, and several of these had no fluorescent cells. This showed they came from eggs produced from the mouse's existing ovary.
Women, unlike mice, could not be given ovarian tissue from other healthy people, which their body would probably reject.
However, their own ovarian tissue, frozen and injected back into the body, could now provide hope of restarting their ovaries.
This is thought to be partly because of signals sent to the pituitary gland in the brain, which could start regulating a monthly cycle again. It could bring women back from an early menopause.
On the study, published in October in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, Prof Capel said: 'We hope we can find out what causes this, and develop a drug which might do the same thing.'
[UK Dailymail]
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