Stem Cell Research Looking to Help Understand Infertility
Every time I see stem cells in a headline you can expect to see me post about it. Why? Simply because the benefits of stem cell research are off the charts, and for some reason we have many people that don’t want us doing it for various reasons (mostly because they don’t understand it, combined with religion).
New research is being done at the Stanford University School of Medicine that hopes to unravel the mysteries of infertility for other couples struggling to conceive by using human embryonic stem cells derived from excess IVF embryos. These are embryos that will not be used and end up being DISCARDED. They certainly don’t qualify for online life insurance either.
“Ten to 15 percent of couples are infertile,” said senior author Renee Reijo Pera, PhD. “About half of these cases are due to an inability to make eggs or sperm. And yet deleting or increasing the expression of genes in the womb to understand why is both impossible and unethical. 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 for these people.” Reijo Pera is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the medical school and the director of Stanford’s Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education. The study will be published online by Nature on Oct. 28.
Previous efforts to study infertility have been hampered by the fact that — unlike many other biological processes — the human reproductive cycle cannot be adequately studied in animal models. And because germ cells begin to form very early in embryonic development (by eight to 10 weeks), there’s been a dearth of human material to work with. “Humans have a unique reproductive system,” Reijo Pera said. “Until now we’ve relied on studies in mice to understand human germ cell differentiation, but the reproductive genes are not the same. This is the first evidence that you can create functional human germ cells in a laboratory.”
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Filed under: Biology, Science, Stem Cells by JMH
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