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| courtesy: Parkinsonsnewstoday.com |
Recently a fascinating paper was published about a novel treatment to increase the fertility lifespan in females. The researchers have achieved a breakthrough in finding a treatment to delay the sharp decrease of fertility in females right before their mid-30s.
Research by Dr. Coleen Murphy, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genomics at Princeton University and her team reported about a protein that can preserve the fertility potential of women in mid-30s and can potentially extend eggs’ life.
The work was recently published in Current Biology, and authors were able to document an extension of eggs’ viability in two separate experiments.
Murphy and colleagues observed that a protein called cathepsin B proteases was present in abundance in aging oocytes of Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode commonly used as an animal model for a wide variety of studies.
They also observed that many of the genes from the worm were also conserved in humans, thereby providing an important resource on understanding the aging in human’s eggs.
The researcher hypothesized that knocking of cathepsin-B genes in adult worms should result in stalling the oocyte aging and improving its quality.
They knocked down individual genes in adult worm by sing iRNA, and surprisingly the reproductive lifespan increased by 10% and morphology of oocyte also showed improvements.
Once the aging effect of cathepsin-B proteases was documented, they proceeded to treat wild-worms with a potent cell-permeable cathepsin B inhibitor (MDL-28170). This pharmacological treatment was able to slow down the decline in the quality of oocyte as the women age.
Most importantly, the drug-induced decline was achieved even when it was applied around mid-life. This has wider implications for those women who want to delay childbearing because of socio-economic commitments, they can easily gain 3 to 6 years extension in terms of fertility.
Although cathepsin B inhibitor is not yet ready for testing in humans, the research has opened new doors regarding pharmacological therapy for delaying reproductive aging.
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