Originally published September 27 2005
New freezing technique offers new hope for organ recipients
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Researchers at Israel's Agricultural Research Organization have successfully removed and re-implanted ovaries in a sheep using a revolutionary freezing process, and The Globe and Mail reports that this marks the first time an organ had ever been frozen, thawed and successfully returned to full function, offering new hope for patients awaiting organ transplants.
A new way of freezing tissue has allowed researchers to successfully remove, store and re-implant ovaries in sheep, providing hope the procedure could one day be used for women at risk of losing their fertility.
Furthermore, the freezing process may offer a way to preserve scarce donor organs, such as hearts, kidneys and livers, which now must be transplanted into recipients within hours of retrieval, the scientists say.
"This is the first time an intact organ was frozen, thawed and came back to full function," said Dr. Amir Arav, a biologist at Israel's Agricultural Research Organization.
Dr. Arav and his team were then able to retrieve eggs from the transplanted ovaries, which were chemically induced to begin cell-division --- the process triggered naturally by sperm fertilization that turns them into embryos.
"What was most surprising was that when we opened the animals and collected the oocytes (eggs), they looked fine and we were able to activate them and produce embryos from these eggs," said Dr. Arav, lead author of a paper published Thursday in Human Reproduction.
"The method of freezing is a new technique, a new concept in thermodynamics, where we can control the ice crystal propagation and we can freeze very, very slowly," he said.
Co-author Yehudit Nathan of Core Dynamics, the biotech company that funded and provided technological expertise for the project, said the next goal is to attempt to transplant ovaries in women at risk of losing their fertility.
"The attraction of doing this with the whole ovary is that if you're successful with the surgery and the freezing, you should be able to restore to the natural state completely, that is not just to have a few cycles for a year or two or three --- which is feasible with the tissue slices --- but to have a full reproductive lifespan," said Dr. Gosden, formerly of Montreal's McGill University.
"I think there's a good chance it may eventually work in humans," said Dr. Gosden, who was part of the U.S. team that transplanted an ovary to a sterile women from her fully reproductive identical twin.
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