Finding Balance through Innovation

Top 10 Innovations for 2010

#5 Fertility Preservation Through Oocyte Cryopreservation

While a healthy male can produce sperm throughout life and father a child at an advanced age, women have not been as fortunate-until now.br />
Oocyte (egg) cryopreservation, or egg freezing, can be used effectively to put a healthy woman's biological clock on hold until years later when she is eventually ready to conceive. This cutting-edge reproductive procedure also allows women at risk of losing their fertility due to medical circumstances the chance to circumvent sterility brought on by cancer treatment or other medical maladies that seriously damage childbearing potential.br />
Female fertility is linked to age. Born with six million eggs, by the time she reaches puberty, a young girl has half a million, and subsequently loses 30 at each menstrual cycle. By her late 20s, a woman's fertility begins to decline dramatically, with the quality and quantity of her eggs falling off rapidly after age 35. By 40, odds of conception plummet to as low as 5% per month.br />
Enter the oocyte cryopreservation. This rapidly-improving reproductive technology has been borrowed from experimental laboratories that once worked exclusively with women suffering from cancers and illnesses that could make them infertile and has moved into local clinics nationwide. Here the eggs of a healthy woman can be safely frozen and stored, ready to be thawed and later fertilized and implanted in her womb whenever she is ready for motherhood.br />
Oocyte cryopreservation is straightforward. Hormones are first taken by a woman to stimulate ovulation. The "young" eggs are extracted surgically (eight or more mature eggs are needed to ensure a pregnancy) with an ultrasound needle, carefully frozen with a new process, and stored in liquid nitrogen. Years later, when a woman wishes to start or expand her family, the eggs can be safely thawed without the formation of ice crystals that can destroy the eggs structure and then fertilized and placed in her uterus (or that of a surrogate).br />
Egg freezing has opened a new frontier for women who desperately want to have children but cannot. For decades, frozen sperm and embryos (fertilized eggs) have successfully been used by infertile couples for the purposes of extended fertility preservation, but it wasn't until recently that the freezing and thawing of unfertilized eggs had been successfully perfected.br />
"The problem is that eggs, which are the largest cells in the body, are mostly made of water," says Tommaso Falcone, MD, Professor and Chairman, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Chair, OB/GYN & Women's Health Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. "Unlike sperm, which is all cellular material and freezes nicely, ice crystals form when eggs are refrozen and they burst when thawed."br />
Thanks to new cryopreservation techniques developed in Italy and elsewhere, however, these major impediments have been successfully sidestepped and the egg can now be protected from the dangers of "freezer burn" that previously compromised the integrity of the egg during freezing and thawing.br />
Many new mothers are jubilant. Although deemed investigational by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, at latest count there have been more than 900 healthy births worldwide as a result of this novel egg-banking technology.