Cryopreservation Will Help Women And Endangered Species

We’ve all seen science fiction movies where people traveling great distances in space were sleeping in “refrigerators” that kept them at the same age when they woke up as they were at the start of the journey hundreds of years ago. Scientists have been working at transforming this technique into reality and even tough they are far away from what Hollywood presented, cryopreservation took huge steps forward.

These new techniques give new hope to women whose fertility have been affected by diseases that lead to destruction of reproductive tissues (such as ovarian cancer, Endometriosis and other diseases). But the same techniques that work for women can also be used to protect endangered animal species and maintain stocks of farm animals.This can be done by maintaining banks of ovarian tissue or even nascent embryos that can used to produce offspring at some point in the future.

But first of all what is cryopreservation ? Cryopreservation is a process where cells or whole tissues are preserved by cooling to low sub-zero temperatures, such as (typically) 77 K or −196 °C (the boiling point of liquid nitrogen). At these low temperatures, any biological activity, including the biochemical reactions that would lead to cell death, is effectively stopped. However, this technique is not that simple and has many impediments.

Although preserving animal and human ovarian tissues are clearly related fields, until recently the research in these domains has been heavily divided. But now these similar domains have found a middle path to come together and reinforce each other, following a highly successful workshop on cryopreservation of ovarian tissue, organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF). According to the ESF workshop’s convenor Claus Yding Andersen, each of these two fields has experience to share with the other, and if a collaboration will be made, tge progress is most likely to be accelerated.

Both parties can learn from each other,” said Andersen. “Experiments which cannot be performed in women can be done in animal species,” he noted, pointing out that much of the progress in humans has come as a result of animal experiments. But it is in humans where most successful transplantations of frozen ovarian tissue after thawing have been carried out, and where greatest experience in the field has been gained. Therefore the ESF conference considered how this could be applied to conservation of endangered species. “The vast experience in women, with several children born as a result of transplantation of frozen/thawed ovarian tissue, can be applied in endangered species to know where to implant and how to obtain pregnancies,” said Andersen. The techniques will also be valuable in agriculture, for preserving ovaries of farm animals in tissue banks with the potential for subsequent re-creation.

To this date, 25 women worldwide have ovarian tissue transplanted. Out of these 25, five have given birth to babies following the successful transplantation of the frozen/thawed ovarian tissue, including two in Belgium, one in Israel, and two in Denmark. “We are likely to see a lot more of this coming in the coming years, including development of techniques for fertility preservation using different approaches,” said Andersen. Highlighting the recent progress in human ovarian cryoperservation was the main purpouse of this conference. As the technology perfects itself and becomes widely available the number of over one thousend women that had their tissue preserved is most likely to increase.

The ESF workshop will help give Europe a healthy base to expand cryopreservation research by unifying the human and animal sectors and applying common expertise and tools.” I believe that we had a very good interaction between all participants and the workshop has already established new collaborations and interactions,” said Andersen.

It seems like cryopreservation will become only a matter of ethics, not one of technology.