As the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) debates the merits of mitochondrial replacement in eggs' some observers will be looking for hints as to how the agency may regulate another mitochondrial manipulation-one with fewer ethical and safety concerns. OvaScience, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wants to boost the success rate of in vitro fertilization (IVF) by infusing eggs with fresh mitochondria. The mitochondria are harvested from an IVF patient's own egg precursor cells, a cell type discovered by Jonathan Tilly, a reproductive biologist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Tilly says that these precursor cells can be coaxed to develop into mature eggs in adult women, challenging the dogma that women are bom with all the eggs they will ever have. Tilly's results are disputed (see Nature 491, 318-320; 2012), but OvaScience has long-term plans to harvest precursor cells and use them to create fresh eggs for women for whom conventional IVF has failed.
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