Helping Infertile Women Be Biological Mothers
July 3, 2001 -- When a woman cannot produce a viable egg, she is, by definition, infertile. Now, however, a New York fertility researcher says his team may have discovered a way to supply infertile women with viable eggs that contain the woman's own genetic material.
As women age their eggs become less viable, so this new technique could offer hope for women who are in the 40s or even in their 50s. But researcher Gianpiero Palermo, MD, PhD, tells WebMD that younger women who have had their ovaries removed because of cancer could also benefit from this new type of fertility treatment.
Currently, some infertile women are implanted with donor eggs that are fertilized with sperm from the woman's partner, but this new process could allow a previously infertile woman to be a true biological mother. Palermo says that this experimental procedure uses genetic material from a cell taken from the infertile woman and transplants that material into a donor egg, which has had its genetic material removed.
This process is somewhat similar to the cloning technique that was used to create Dolly, the first cloned sheep. There is, however, a crucial difference: Palermo is using only half of the genetic code contained in the adult cell -- that of the mother.
All adult cells carry two sets of chromosomes, one from the mother and a second from the father. This "pair" contains 46 chromosomes, which carry the donor's complete genetic code. Cloning uses all the genetic material -- both sets of chromosomes -- from an adult cell, which means that the offspring produced this way is an exact genetic copy of the adult donor.
Palermo, who is an assistant professor at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at Cornell University Medical Center, uses just one set of chromosomes so that the reconstructed egg will "closely resemble a natural" egg, which has only one set of chromosomes. The second set comes from the sperm, which also only carries a single chromosome copy.
At this point, Palermo says that his work is very preliminary but he has had some success.
Helping Infertile Women Be Biological Mothers
July 3, 2001 -- When a woman cannot produce a viable egg, she is, by definition, infertile. Now, however, a New York fertility researcher says his team may have discovered a way to supply infertile women with viable eggs that contain the woman's own genetic material.
As women age their eggs become less viable, so this new technique could offer hope for women who are in the 40s or even in their 50s. But researcher Gianpiero Palermo, MD, PhD, tells WebMD that younger women who have had their ovaries removed because of cancer could also benefit from this new type of fertility treatment.
Currently, some infertile women are implanted with donor eggs that are fertilized with sperm from the woman's partner, but this new process could allow a previously infertile woman to be a true biological mother. Palermo says that this experimental procedure uses genetic material from a cell taken from the infertile woman and transplants that material into a donor egg, which has had its genetic material removed.
This process is somewhat similar to the cloning technique that was used to create Dolly, the first cloned sheep. There is, however, a crucial difference: Palermo is using only half of the genetic code contained in the adult cell -- that of the mother.
All adult cells carry two sets of chromosomes, one from the mother and a second from the father. This "pair" contains 46 chromosomes, which carry the donor's complete genetic code. Cloning uses all the genetic material -- both sets of chromosomes -- from an adult cell, which means that the offspring produced this way is an exact genetic copy of the adult donor.
Palermo, who is an assistant professor at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at Cornell University Medical Center, uses just one set of chromosomes so that the reconstructed egg will "closely resemble a natural" egg, which has only one set of chromosomes. The second set comes from the sperm, which also only carries a single chromosome copy.
At this point, Palermo says that his work is very preliminary but he has had some success.
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