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Coculture with ovarian cancer cell enhances human blastocyst formation in vitro
A Ben-Chetrit1, A Jurisicova, R F Casper
1Division of Reproductive Sciences, Toronto Hospital Research Institute, Ontario, Canada.
Objective:
To examine the effect of human embryo coculture with an ovarian cancer cell line.
Design:
Prospective, randomized in vitro study.
Setting:
University of Toronto IVF clinic at The Toronto Hospital.
Patients:
Couples undergoing IVF who chose not to cryopreserve their spare embryos and were willing to donate spare embryos for research.
Intervention:
Spare embryos were cultured randomly either under regular conditions with Ham's F-10 medium supplemented with 10% heat inactivated human serum (n = 189) or were cocultured in the same medium, with human ovarian epithelial cancer cells (n = 173).
Main Outcome Measure:
Blastocyst formation.
Results:
Coculture with the cancer cell line improved the preimplantation embryo development to the blastocyst stage. There was a significant increase in the number of cavitating morulae (68%) and the proportion of embryos reaching the fully expanded blastocyst stage (39%) compared with those in standard culture medium (34% and 23%, respectively).
Conclusion:
Coculture of early cleavage stage human embryos with epithelial cancer cells markedly improves in vitro human blastocyst formation compared with standard culture conditions.