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Researchers from Aarhus University have just received an innovation prize called The Next Big Thing. They receive the award for their work on developing new drugs which can activate eggs in childless women and in this way improve fertility treatment.
2019.05.14 |
This is not the first occasion on which Karin Lykke-Hartmann and her team have been honoured for their research. At the beginning of May she was honoured with a Proof of Concept grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s BioInnovation Institute initiative which will help the researchers to develop an animal model.
A twenty-year-old woman has a 34 per cent chance of becoming pregnant per month. Once she turns forty, that same chance is six per cent. Provided she has sex twice a week. Biomedical researchers from Aarhus University have just received the Danish IP Fairs prize, The Next Big Thing, for their research into fertility.
The researchers have demonstrated how the egg reserve can be affected in mice – thereby activating the earliest eggs. In the long term, this can lead to the woman becoming pregnant with her own eggs.
“We have patented our discoveries and are now in the process of developing the technology required to form more potent compounds which can further the formation of mature eggs in infertile women,” says the head of the project, Karin Lykke-Hartmann.
The research team are currently designing a treatment requiring a very small amount of the compound and a short incubation time, which is to say that the compound only needs to be present for a relatively short period of time. In addition to significantly increasing the fertility of the women, this will also mean fewer side effects from the fertility treatment.
PhD, Associate Professor Karin Lykke-Hartmann
Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine
Tel.: (+45) 2939 0558
Email: kly@biomed.au.dk