If you are interested in participating in stem cell research, you may be able to help. Professors Douglas Melton and Kevin Eggan are actively recruiting couples who are willing to donate embryos and women who are willing to donate eggs for our research.

For several years, Professor Melton's Lab, in collaboration with Dr. Powers at Boston IVF, has obtained excess frozen embryos from patients who have chosen to donate them for research. To date, this has resulted in the derivation of 28 new human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines. These cell lines are distributed, free of charge, to scientists throughout the Unites States and the world. This work has tripled the number of hESC lines available to scientists worldwide for research. In collaboration with Professor Kevin Eggan, Professor Melton plans to continue to derive hESC lines from excess embryos.

If you have excess frozen embryos that you are interested in donating to stem cell research, please call 617-496-3345 or email stemcelldonation@scrb.harvard.edu

In addition to the ongoing work described above, Drs. Eggan and Melton plan to derive hESC lines for specific diseases, to aid in the understanding of those diseases so that new therapies can be developed. One approach is to use excess embryos that have undergone pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). PGD tests one cell of an embryo for a particular disease. This can be done when a couple knows that they are at high risk of having a child with a genetic disease. Embryos that have the genes for the disease are discarded so that only unaffected embryos are transferred to the uterus or frozen for later use. However, the affected embryos that are typically discarded could instead be used to derive hESC lines. These disease specific hESC lines are a valuable tool that can be used to understand the root cause of the disease. PGD can be done for diseases where the specific gene that causes the disease is known and can be tested (for example, Cystic Fibrosis, Huntington's Disease, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or Sickle Cell Anemia).

If you are planning to undergo IVF with PGD and are interested in donating your affected embryos to stem cell research, please call 617-496-3345 or email stemcelldonation@scrb.harvard.edu