TalTech researchers are developing new, more ethical and environmentally sustainable methods to help assess how chemicals affect women’s fertility. Working with 12 partners across Europe, they are participating in the European Commission-funded project MERLON, which aims to develop and test novel approaches for chemical safety assessment and to provide recommendations for regulating chemical use.
In everyday life we are surrounded by many synthetic materials, and it is often unclear how the compounds in them influence our health, including fertility. There is a shortage of methods for testing the effects of environmental chemicals on female fertility. The new methods being developed should also reduce the need for animal experiments and be as gentle on the environment as possible.
TalTech participates in the project through the Reproductive Biology research group led by Associate Professor Agne Velthut-Meikas and through the Microfluidics Laboratory, where automated workflows for microscopy image analysis are being developed. The role of Estonian researchers is to investigate whether cells originating from the human ovarian follicle could be used for chemical safety testing.
Follicle cells play a crucial role in female health: they support egg maturation, take part in ovulation, and the hormones they secrete influence not only the ovaries but many other organs in a woman’s body. During infertility treatment, eggs are retrieved from IVF patients; this procedure also yields follicle cells without requiring any additional interventions. While these cells are usually discarded, they can be used for research. It is known that they can be grown very well in the laboratory; they secrete hormones while in culture and can proliferate successfully. To recruit the IVF patients and collect cells, the project collaborates with the infertility clinic Next Fertility Nordic.
Agne Velthut-Meikas’ research group has previously shown in IVF patients that when a woman’s ovaries contain higher levels of environmental chemicals, her follicle cells respond less effectively to hormones, and gene expression in these cells is also altered. Velthut-Meikas notes: “Now we want to find out whether we see similar changes in lab-grown follicle cells. The aim of the project is to link visual changes in the cells with molecular markers and build a model that can evaluate the different negative effects of synthetic chemicals on the ovary.”
The MERLON project runs for a total of 3.5 years, and more information is available on its website.