Ovarian tissue promises

This week's BioNews includes news that three British hospitals will begin offering the option of ovarian tissue freezing to women or girls undergoing chemotherapy treatment. Because chemotherapy almost always destroys fertility, the ovarian tissue is harvested before treatment in the hope that when it is grafted back on at a later date, the patient's fertility will be restored. Another alternative might be to take the immature egg cells from the ovarian tissue and mature them in the laboratory, so that they can be used for conventional in vitro fertilisation. But this technique is likely to take much longer to perfect.

Neither technique has yet been proven to work in humans. Earlier this year, one New York doctor, was the first to transplant stored tissue back into a patient. But it will take some months of waiting before its success can be gauged. The younger patients, whose chance of success is greater because their ovaries contain many more eggs than those of adult women, will not be seeking to start a family for some years. Only then will an accurate picture of the success of the technique emerge.

In the meantime, as the survival rates for cancer increase and the possibility of ovarian tissue freezing is more widely talked about, more and more patients will have their tissue harvested and stored for possible use in the future. For them, the knowledge that their fertility may be restored after they have gone through chemotherapy treatment is a comfort at what is a very difficult time in their lives. But we should perhaps be careful not to raise their hopes too much. Instead, ovarian tissue storage should be presented as something which may enable women rendered sterile by chemotherapy to do what the rest of us take for granted.