Exploitation of unique growth factors to develop new products for infertility treatment

不孕不育给澳大利亚社会带来了巨大的社会和经济成本；不孕不育是年轻夫妇的主要心理负担，用于治疗不孕不育的技术，如体外受精(IVF)，需要昂贵的药物来刺激卵巢。这些药物对医疗保险的成本预计将超过每年1亿美元。在接下来的十年里。一种生殖技术一直显示出极大的潜力来提高这种负担，即卵母细胞(卵子)体外成熟(IVM)，它极大地降低了药物的使用成本和患者的压力。然而，卵母细胞体外成熟技术在发挥其潜力方面进展缓慢，该技术仍未广泛应用于临床，主要是因为女性的成功率令人失望。我们多年来一直在动物体内研究卵母细胞体外成熟，最近取得了重大的技术突破，成功率提高了约50%。在这一领域，效率提高50%是实质性的，并具有重要的临床和商业应用。目前，我们是全球唯一拥有这项技术的集团。在这个为期两年的项目过程中，我们将进行后续实验，以完善这一发现，并调查使用这种方法治疗人类不孕不育的可行性。我们已经在与两家医疗器械制造商就这项技术的许可进行谈判。我们预计，该项目将带来一系列产品和技术，这些产品和技术将在2-3年内进入治疗不孕不育的临床试验。

Infertility comes at an enormous social and financial cost to Australian society; infertility is a major psychological burden on young couples and the technologies used to treat infertility, such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF), require expensive drugs to stimulate the ovary. The cost of these drugs to Medicare is expected to exceed $100 million p.a. over the next decade. A reproductive technology, which has always shown great potential to elevate some of this burden, is oocyte (egg) in vitro maturation (IVM), which drastically reduces the use-cost of drugs and the stress to patients. However, oocyte IVM has been slow to live up to its potential and the technology is still not in widespread clinical practice, mainly due to disappointing success rates in women. We have been studying oocyte IVM in animals for many years, and have recently made a significant technological breakthrough, improving success rates by ~50%. In this field, a 50% increase in efficiency is substantial and has significant clinical and commercial application. Currently, we are the only group worldwide with this technology. Over the course of this 2-year project we will conduct follow-up experiments to refine this discovery and investigate the feasibility of using this approach to treat human infertility. We are already in negotiations with two medical device manufacturers to licence this technology. We expect that this project will lead to a series of products and technologies that will enter a clinical trial for the treatment of infertility within 2-3 years.