Ruxandra T

Plus remote or hybrid work.

It’s a game changer for us mums who also work outside the home.

Sure there are many jobs that are needlessly exploitative or employers who demand long hrs for little salary etc etc. but, leaving that aside, being a good scientist will always involve a ton of work in ur early years of training

Or take my job as a scientist: I need to spend long hrs to train myself and read papers and so on. I don't see how that can change. It's intrinsic to the job.

I don't see how you can change the fact that for example in order to run a business it takes very long hours and is very demanding. Or that certain surgeries take 12 hrs to complete and in that time you need to be on call.

The next frontier is conquering the motherhood penalty, which has the dual effect of holding women back in their professional lives and stopping them from having the families they'd like to have, through technological advances like in vitro gametogenesis or improved egg freezing

Menopause is pretty unique to us.

What accounts for our relative lack of knowledge when it comes to female reproductive aging?

One reason is the uniqueness of the human female reproductive system, which it makes it harder to study in animal models. Menstruation occurs only in humans and a few primates!

And it's perfectly fine for women to opt into such jobs and not aim to be CEOs or whatever. But some do want to, and the reality is is that it conflicts with also spending loads of time caring for little kids

In fact Claudia goldin talks about the pharmacist career which isn't a greedy career, pays well, and is quite flexible and the gender gap is quite small. That's because of the nature of the job. You don't need to be on call at odd hrs etc

Employment conditions are not shitty. There are plenty of jobs where you can work part time or which are family friendly. But if you wanna be a CEO you'll obvsly have to work more than 40 hrs per week

Women who experience menopause earlier in life or due to surgical removal of their ovaries face even higher risks for these chronic conditions, suggesting that functioning ovaries have a health-protective effect, and later menopause correlates with increased longevity.

Delaying egg aging might postpone the onset of menopause. As a woman’s eggs are depleted, the ovaries send out fewer chemical signals, and she goes through menopause. Menopause is associated w/ age-related diseases such as dementia, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis.

Also, making egg freezing less painful and easier or making eggs from stem cells isn't exactly changing women' bodies

Another solution is simply to delay the aging of the oocytes!

Unfortunately, this solution lies at the intersection of two fields that have traditionally not shown great success. We do not have any approved aging drug and women's health's approvals are the smallest %!

But the higher risks of IVG also come with higher rewards. If companies like Conception are successful, we will be able to completely side-step the egg collection and freezing process!

In-vitro gametogenesis (IVG) is riskier than IVM. With maturation, stem cells form ovarian support cells that help eggs mature but are discarded afterward, so mistakes aren’t passed on. In IVG, however, eggs are made from stem cells, meaning any errors can affect the baby.

Women can opt to not work or reduce hours at the moment. I'm not taking away that option from them

Researchers are pushing boundaries by using proteins (transcription factors) to steer egg development in culture. In 2024, a Harvard team achieved the first induction of human meiosis in vitro, marking a significant leap.

Below progression of stages of meiosis over time

Why?

Turning mice success into a human breakthrough in oocyte production won’t be easy. In mice, only 1-3% of pluripotent stem cell-derived eggs yield pups. Human oocyte development is more complex and slow. This modest mouse success may pose a steep translation challenge.

This approach is called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), and it would bypass the need for egg freezing entirely. Interest in this technique spiked in 2016 when an academic team in Japan first demonstrated the birth of live mouse pups from eggs produced via IVG.

But the big prize companies like Conception and ovelle.bio are after is creating not just ovarian support cells from stem cells, but actual eggs, something that has been achieved in mice.

The opportunities would then be limitless!

In vitro maturation is not a faraway dream. Gameto has started trials to quantify IVM’s ability to rescue those immature eggs that would be discarded in standard IVF. Last December, Gameto announced the birth of the first baby using their IVM Fertilo platform

IVM isn’t just for minimal stimulation—it can also boost standard IVF. About 25% of eggs in IVF cycles are immature and usually discarded. By utilizing these eggs, IVF’s overall live birth rates could be significantly improved, especially for women who yield fewer mature eggs.

IVM collects immature eggs, cutting the need for lengthy, high-dose hormonal treatment. It uses just 3 days of low-dose FSH versus 12 days for mature eggs, reducing pain, nausea, and ovarian hyperstimulation risks, and saves about 20–30% on fertility drug costs.

Companies such as Gameto are working to differentiate iPSCs into ovarian support cells and recreate an ovary in a dish. This would allow doctors to collect immature eggs & induce them to mature in vitro by placing them in the environment of this ‘artificial ovary’.

But there are even better tools we have in our arsenal, and they all derive more or less indirectly from a molecular biology technique that won the Nobel Prize in 2012: the production of iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells)

These early successes are not yet confirmed in larger cohorts or copied across other parts of the egg freezing and fertilization processes, but they show promise for reducing the need for experienced human labor.

One way of increasing efficiency and decreasing cost is automation. Overture Life is a start-up that recently published results from a pilot study using a robot to perform intracytoplasmic sperm injection, something usually performed manually by highly experienced embryologists.

So can we make it better?

Egg freezing and IVF rely on highly skilled human technicians to perform delicate cellular manipulations under a microscope. The precise and manual nature of these procedures also introduces the risk of human error and lapses in consistency