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

不孕症给澳大利亚社会带来了巨大的社会和经济成本;不孕症是年轻夫妇的主要心理负担，用于治疗不孕症的技术，如体外受精（IVF），需要昂贵的药物来刺激卵巢。这些药物的医疗费用预计将超过每年1亿美元。在未来十年。一种生殖技术，一直显示出巨大的潜力，以提高一些这种负担，是卵母细胞（卵子）体外成熟（IVM），这大大降低了药物的使用成本和对患者的压力。然而，卵母细胞IVM一直缓慢地发挥其潜力，该技术仍然没有广泛的临床实践，主要是由于女性的成功率令人失望。多年来，我们一直在研究动物卵母细胞IVM，最近取得了重大技术突破，成功率提高了约50%。在这一领域，50%的效率提高是实质性的，并具有重要的临床和商业应用。目前，我们是世界上唯一拥有这项技术的公司。在这个为期2年的项目中，我们将进行后续实验，以完善这一发现，并研究使用这种方法治疗人类不育症的可行性。我们已经在与两家医疗设备制造商谈判，以获得这项技术的许可。我们预计，该项目将在2-3年内产生一系列产品和技术，用于治疗不孕症。

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.