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Baby Born from Frozen Egg
When cancer survivors want to conceive, they may face hurdles because their eggs or ovaries have been damaged or removed in the course of treatment. Women with male partners have found a way to overcome this: before they begin treatment, they have their eggs extracted and fertilized, resulting in embryos that are frozen and stored for later use.
But what about women who don’t have partners when the cancer is diagnosed? Instead of freezing an embryo, they’re left with the prospect of freezing only stand-alone eggs, anticipating fertilization by some future partner. Yet the ability to successfully freeze and thaw a mature egg has remained elusive—until now. In what possibly amounts to a joyous medical breakthrough for tens of thousands of survivors, researchers have announced the birth of a baby girl conceived from an egg that was frozen and then thawed before fertilization.
The technique has not yet been tried in cancer patients, cautions lead researcher Hananel Holzer, M.D., of the McGill Reproductive Center in Montreal. “This may develop into a major option for fertility preservation for cancer patients, but we have to remember it’s a small number of cases so far.”
