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A drug that stops cancer treatments damaging ovaries could preserve patients’
fertility. Researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and
Massachusetts General Hospital injected a compound called
sphingosine-1-phosphate into the ovaries of mice. This prevented a lipid in the
membrane of an egg cell being converted into another lipid called ceramide and
starting a chain reaction that ends in cell suicide (Nature Medicine,
vol 6, p 1109). “If they have stopped [cell death] and produced normal embryos
from the ovaries, this is fantastic,” says Geraldine Hartshorne of the University of Warwick.