Medical revolution 'to eradicate infertility within decade'

Infertility could be totally eradicated within a decade because of a revolutionary technique for making artificial eggs and sperm, a leading scientist said yesterday.

Professor Alan Trounson, a fertility specialist at Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development in Victoria, Australia, said that generating sperm and eggs in the laboratory would soon become a reality.

"I'm certain that in the long term we'll be able to help everybody. At some time in the future we'll be able to take cells and reconstruct the equivalent of sperm or the equivalent of eggs," Professor Trounson said at the Science Media Centre in London.

"In 10 years' time I think we might think it's a rather good thing to do for someone who has had cancer and lost all their sperm or lost all their eggs," he said.

One scenario is to create embryonic stem cells by the Dolly cloning technique. This requires taking the nucleus of a skin cell and inserting it into an egg cell with its own nucleus removed in order to generate embryonic stem cells.

These stem cells could be coaxed into becoming the "germ cells" of the body - cells that can make either sperm or eggs - which could then be transplanted into a woman's ovaries or a man's testes via conventional key-hole surgery.

"There is a huge potential in those embryonic stem cells and it has been demonstrated that these cells will be used very widely in therapeutic techniques for tissue repair. I expect they will be very widely used in the future," Professor Trounson said.

Speaking on the eve of the 25th birthday of Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, he said that more than a million babies have been conceived as a result of assisted reproduction technology. "If you told me back in 1979 to 1980 that there would be a million babies by now, I wouldn't have believed you because at that time there was [only] about one in 20 patients that were helped by the technique," Professor Trounson said.

"I would have thought that now it's probably 75 per cent, probably three out of four couples who are infertile that can be helped. I believe that in the future everybody who is infertile will be helped.

"I say that because what the future holds is the intersection of the stem cell area with the reproductive area. It hasn't happened yet, but it will."

Many of the reasons for infertility have been addressed, but some couples continue to remain childless because they are unable to produce either eggs or sperm for in vitro fertilisation (IVF), Professor Trounson said.

"We've been able to take care of most of the infertility and a great deal of infertility can be treated by the current procedures that are available," he said. "We'll continue to address the genetic problems that come up from time to time by being clever about removing the genetically or chromosomally abnormal embryos."

"I think basically now there aren't many uterine problems that are still causing a major issue, so this means you are getting towards those patients who have no sperm and no eggs so I think, in the long term, stem cells will provide an opportunity, and this is long term, 10 years plus, but in the long term the message is there, it is potentially possible."