One of the most interesting presentations I saw at the Vitalist Bay longevity conference was the one by University of Colorado professor Joshua Johnson. While the presentation was on the overall theme of ovarian aging, the most interesting part of his presentation was where he discussed his conjecture that the key driver in menopause is the number of remaining primordial follicles that a women has. Once the number drops down to around 2,000 menopause sets in.
He believes that if you could do a tissue harvest of the primordial follicles when a woman is relatively young (between 16 and 25 or 30), you could freeze this tissue until the person reaches 45 years old or so, and then re-introduce it to the woman’s body. And because the woman would then have a large number of these primordial follicles again, she would likely never experience menopause, with all the health benefits that would accrue because of the delay in menopause.
Of course, this also leads me to wonder if there may be the opportunity for primordial follicle transplants from younger women to older women… I did not get a chance to ask him this question.
This research area is being funded in part by AthenaDAO, and Xiaoxi Wei, Founder and CEO, X-Therma, was in the audience and it seemed like they are working on technologies that could help facilitate these types of services in the future.
Needless to say, there was a lot of enthusiasm in the crowd for a company to validate the theory, and commercialize this service and make it available quickly for women.
More on Joshua Johnson: Joshua Johnson, PhD | CU Division of Reproductive Sciences
More on the Johnson Lab: https://johnsonlab.github.io
See details in the presentation below: (Note: you can click on the image to enlarge it, then use the arrows on the right and left side of the image to click through all the images).
