More and more elderly women are getting the chance to safely bear and deliver babies through a new technology that alters their egg cells.
At a recent conference in Germany, Dr. Robert Casper, medical director of TCART Fertility Partners, said his clinic has recorded higher success rates among women who tried their new procedure called AUGMENT.
This technology involves the replacement of the older egg cells' mitochondria, known to be the powerhouse of the cell, with a new one taken from stem cells found in a women's uterus.
The procedure is being done because older egg cells are more prone to abnormalities that prevent them from developing into healthy babies once fertilized by a sperm cell.
Casper reported that 12 out of 34 women who tried the AUGMENT procedure bore healthy babies.
One of these women, Natasha Rajani, already gave birth to a boy named Zain last April at a fertility clinic in Toronto, Canada.
Prior to the new procedure, only eight women who tried in vitro fertilization got pregnant, and seven of those miscarried.
Although the initial results look promising, the AUGMENT procedure still needs to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
This new technology is also still undergoing more procedures at a clinic in Turkey, and needs to be published and peer-reviewed.
There are also more reasons to remain cautious about the AUGMENT procedure since trial sizes are still very tiny at this point. More research will have to be done, especially that which involves comparing results to women who have not tried the procedure yet.
Reproductive biologist John Eppig also warned that the AUGMENT procedure did not follow the standard operating procedure of conducting experimental medical procedures first on animals before trying them on humans.
"We really don't know what the consequences of adding mitochondria to an egg cell are," he explained.
