In the UK, In Vitro Fertilisation, most commonly known as IVF, was first successfully achieved in 1978 by Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe.
The IVF technique involves the fertilisation of a woman’s egg in a laboratory which is then returned to the womb to continue growing and developing. It is one of the most common and most successful alternatives to a regular pregnancy.
"Three live mice were born from the original experiment which suggests high hopes although the success rate is currently less than one percent."
Scientists are always looking for ways to improve and recent research findings have paved the way for a possible new method; making IVF eggs from a patient's skin cells. This potential method was explored in a paper published in Science Advances.
One of the authors of the study, Aleksei Mikhalchenko, recognised the technique’s “potential to revolutionise IVF and offer hope to many infertile patients”.
The idea is to remove the nucleus from a donor’s egg – the place where DNA is stored – and replace it with a nucleus extracted from a parent’s skin cell. The egg would then be cultured in order to have it discard half of its chromosomes and reach the desired state to then be fertilised by sperm. They called this technique In Vitro Gametogenesis.
Three live mice were born from the original experiment which suggests high hopes although the success rate is currently less than one percent. This means that the potentially revolutionary discovery would take around a decade of testing and approval before it is authorised for humans, should the conclusions be positive.
If they succeed, this would change many lives. Older women, women whose eggs are damaged, as well as men in same-sex relationships could be granted the opportunity to have children sharing both of the parents’ DNA.