Renee Reijo Pera

[FayeForCure]

Renee Reijo Pera of the University of California, San Francisco, is
also
working with eggs originally produced for a fertility clinic, but which
turn out to be immature. Such eggs are not routinely used in clinics,
though they can be matured in a lab.

Reijo Pera noted such lab-matured eggs can produce babies, so "the egg
is not going to be the problem" in her stem cell work, she said.

http://www.casperstartribune.net/articl ... panv84.txt

[FayeForCure]

Stanford Hires Embryonic Stem Cell Research Expert
Feb 1 2007, 12:32 PM EST
Business Wire


The Stanford University School of Medicine has recruited Renee Reijo Pera, PhD, to be the new director of human embryonic stem cell research and education for the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.

Reijo Pera, 47, is joining Stanford from the University of California-San Francisco, where she was co-director of the human embryonic stem cell research center and director of the training program funded through the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. In 2003 she established UCSF's embryonic stem cell program, pulling together faculty with common interests in human embryonic stem cell biology.

Reijo Pera said her new position is a perfect fit for her research interests. "The strength of the research community is tremendous at Stanford," she said, listing the strong human genetics and developmental biology programs, and the school's world-class assisted reproduction clinic. Her work will draw on the strengths of those departments to probe human developmental genetics. "The people and research are amazing."

Her primary appointment will be in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology where she will be director of human stem cell research. ...

In addition to her work understanding early human development, Reijo Pera has led an effort at UCSF to develop new embryonic stem cell lines, and plans to continue this work with Stanford colleagues. A collaboration with Stanford's in vitro fertilization clinic is already under way to develop new stem cell lines from donated embryos.

Weissman said that in addition to Reijo Pera's ongoing work developing new lines from IVF blastocysts, he thinks her work could lead to new avenues of creating embryonic stem cell lines. Her research could reveal ways of differentiating embryonic stem cells into eggs that can eventually be used as an alternative to eggs donated by women.

http://www.genengnews.com/news/bnitem.a ... e=12108294

[FayeForCure]

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?sectio ... id=6715247

Watch the video in the link above.

In her lab at Stanford University, Renee Reijo Pera studies the tiniest building blocks of human life, hoping to coax embryonic stem cells into becoming eggs and sperm and perhaps unlock the secrets of why some embryos develop into a healthy fetus and others don't.

"Ever since the birth of Louise Brown, the first baby born by IVF [in vitro fertilization] is that we don't really know good quality embryo from a poor quality embryo," says Reijo Pera.
She points out that nearly three quarters of the patients who undergo fertility treatment, do not become pregnant. That leads to some clinics to transfering multiple embryos, sometimes resulting in twins, triplets, or as in the recent highly-publicized case, octuplets.
"We hope someday we get to a situation where only one embryo is transferred or at most two embryos," says Reijo Pera.
While Reijo-Pera's work holds the promise of major breakthroughs, it also skirts on the edge of what some critics have called the manipulation of human reproduction.
Last month, a doctor in Southern California ignited a fresh debate by claiming that he'll soon offer parents the chance to choose their child's hair and eye color.
"The most important issues to address are birth defects and multiple embryo transfer, and I'm not a supporter of tinkering with other human traits," says Reijo Pera.
Reijo Pera believes the episode diverts attention from the true promise of stem cell research and the potential to eventually treat disorders like Down syndrome in the first days of life.
The work at Stanford is privately funded by grants from C.I.R.M., the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which has allowed the lab, to create its own embryonic stem cell lines from embryos donated by families undergoing fertility treatment. Research at C.I.R.M. has been ongoing despite restrictions put in place by the Bush Administration eight years ago.
"We think that there a great opportunity to use human embryonic stem cells to understand human reproduction. And so our center at Stanford has really had a fundamental base in human embryology and human embryonic stem cells are an extension of that," says Reijo Pera.
Of course, many of those restrictions were just overturned by President Obama.