Dr. Ariel Revel
Photo: Gabi Menashe
Young cancer patiences find hope for pregnancy
Photo: Itay Gal
Child cancer patients find hope for future fertility
Israeli scientists successfully extract, mature eggs from five-year-old female cancer patients to freeze for possible fertility treatment in the future
Israeli scientists have successfully extracted and frozen eggs from the ovarian tissue of five-year-old female cancer patients in the hope of securing successful fertility treatment in the future, Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Dr Ariel Revel, head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem, announced the breakthrough at Tuesday's 23rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE), in Lyon, France.
While survival rates of childhood cancer continue to improve and have reached 70 to 90 percent, the aggressive chemotherapy needed to fight the growths severely damages the patient's fertility.
In male patients, sperm samples can be taken and frozen before treatment for future use. Up until this breakthrough, it was believed that female patients before puberty did not have a similar option, since freezing the ovarian cortex, which contains the egg-producing follicles, would destroy the tissue.
The more successful way to harvest eggs is to retrieve individual eggs from the follicles, which are more resistant to extreme cold. Dr Revel's team was astonished to discover that this was possible in girls as young as five to 10 years old, well before puberty.
"We were able to extract oocytes (cells that later produce eggs) using needle aspiration from very young girls," said Dr Revel.
"For example, we found seven eggs in a girl of five years old with Wilm's tumour, eight in an eight year old with Ewing's sarcoma, and 17 in a 10 year old, also with Ewing's sarcoma. We were then able to mature the eggs in vitro and freeze them for use in the future," he explained.
The researchers were able to mature 41 of 130 eggs in vitro which were then frozen.
Despite the success, it is still too early to determine whether the study was successful, as none of the eggs have been thawed since the patients are still too young for fertilization.
Revel and his team said that the final results of this study would not be apparent until at least the next 10 years, when the girls decided to attempt to get pregnant.
"But we are encouraged by our results so far, particularly the young ages of the patients from which we have been able to collect eggs. We believe that no younger patients have ever undergone egg collection, in vitro maturation, and egg freezing," said Dr Revel.
"We are hopeful that the mature eggs can offer these girls a realistic possibility of preserving their fertility," he concluded.
