Human skin cells are turned into eggs in fertility breakthrough

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Researchers in the US have developed a new IVF technique that could one day be used to help those struggling with infertility, or same-sex couples, have biological children. Scientists have turned DNA from skin cells into functional eggs, which were then able to be fertilised by sperm in a lab.

Transcript

00:00The researchers took DNA from, yeah, a skin cell, a human skin cell, and then put it into

00:07an egg that had been emptied of its own DNA. Once it did that, it's got the wrong number

00:13of chromosomes. So the team then decided to do another technique, which they've called

00:21mitomeosis, sorry. And this is a combination of the two normal ways that cell division

00:29would normally work in a human. While this was just a proof of concept, the team were

00:34able to fertilize a number of the eggs, and 9% of them went on to the blaster site stage.

00:41So that's the embryo stage where it becomes, it would be implanted in an IVF scenario. If

00:48this was to work, the technique would be able to be used by same-sex couples to have biological

00:54babies, or to help people that no longer can use their eggs to still be able to have biological

01:02children. The research is still in its very early stages, and although 9% of the eggs did

01:09form in this way, it became embryos, it's not to say that there weren't issues. So a lot

01:15of the blaster sites, a lot of the actual eggs that they used, ended up having the wrong number

01:21of chromosomes, or they weren't able to divide the chromosomes in the way that it would normally

01:27happen in traditional embryogenesis. So it's still quite far away yet. The researcher who

01:34I spoke to suggested that it might be up to a decade away.

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