Extended female fertility?

Christina Jones, founder of an Allston-based company that aims to preserve women's reproductive cells, has first-hand knowledge of the service she is offering. She has had some of her own such cells frozen in straw-like pipettes held in tanks of liquid nitrogen.

Jones, 34, of Cambridge, had her eggs extracted and frozen in May, prior to her company's official launch in June.

"I don't know if I'll ever need them, but if I do, I'm glad that they're there," said Jones, who graduated this spring from Havard Business School and plans to get married next month.

That is the attitude she hopes others will embrace by signing up with Extend Fertility, a company Jones began formulating last year, when she says she became more conscious of her own ticking biological clock.

Jones noticed that reports she had read about the prospects of career women conceiving later in life seemed negative. Their typical message: If she or any of her women friends didn't "find a guy" -- in Jones's words -- before 35 they might be out of luck as far as being able to bear their own biological children.

So Jones, a seasoned entrepreneur who at 19 cofounded her first business, decided to do something about it. She began researching what was going on in the emerging field of freezing a woman's eggs and spoke to fertility specialists. While the technology is still in the experimental phase, Jones decided her business idea had the potential for far-reaching impact.

Instead of letting women watch their reproductive options dwindle as they postpone pregnancy to their mid-30s and beyond, Jones went to work putting together the technical and business components that would enable her to offer hope that motherhood could be possible using eggs preserved years earlier. That same hope would then be available to women facing impaired fertility caused by illness or medical treatments such as chemotherapy.

The exact number of babies born from previously frozen eggs is unknown, though most put the total below 100. Dr. Thomas L. Toth, a fertility specialist and director of the Vincent Memorial In Vitro Fertilization Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, says the figure is closer to 40.

A "great deal" of research on the process has been conducted in that period, Toth said. While he declined to comment specifically on Jones's venture, he said he believes that within the next five years, the technology could possibly be as effective as sperm freezing, a common and easy procedure that has been done for years.

"If men can freeze their sperm," Toth said, "we would like women to have the same option." Still, unlike sperm, the egg is a much more sophisticated cell, holding most of life's "genetic machinery," which makes it more difficult to preserve, he said.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine expects to publish its first guidelines on egg-freezing in October, when it has indicated it will recommend the procedure be considered experimental at this point and not marketed as a way to defer reproductive aging, according to Dr. Owen Davis, who is on the society's board of directors and helped write the guidelines.

"It is not that the concept is wrong," said Davis, "but that it needs to be handled appropriately. We just don't think it's quite ready for prime time." The society does, however, advocate the procedure for women who may have their fertility compromised due to illness, he said.

Jones's company has started freezing women's eggs at partner fertility clinics in California and Texas, while administrative tasks are managed in Boston. Plans to partner with clinics in Boston and elsewhere are underway, Jones said. Boston will have an egg-storage facility within the next six months, she said.

The first few extraction and freezing procedures were undertaken this summer, at a charge to each patient of about $10,000, plus at least $2,500 in hormonal drugs used to stimulate the ovaries to increase egg production. Monthly fees for maintaining the eggs also apply. The company has received around 100 inquiries about the technique, she said.

Molding businesses has been her professional life's work. At 19, she said, she knew that she wanted to be in business.

"I just love the process of building and creating things," Jones said. "I like seeing the results of your labor. That's why I do what I do."

Between her sophomore and junior years at Stanford University in California, where she graduated with an economics degree, she "kind of stumbled into" starting a company with a colleague. She had only been looking for a summer job, but she landed instead at Trilogy, a software supplier, and it became her "new, next frontier," she said.

From Trilogy, she carved out one of its business units, and made pcOrder its own private company in 1996. Three years later, the company went public, making Jones worth $60 million on paper, according to Forbes magazine, only to be re-acquired later by its parent company after the tech bust. Still, Jones left with about $8 million, according to reports.

As a result of her success with those two companies, Jones has won numerous honors, including the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst & Young, the accounting and business advisory giant, in 1999.

Now, on her third business venture, Jones says her master's degree from Harvard Business School has not only given her additional business resources, but also brought her closer to a childhood home.

For the last two years while living in Cambridge, she's been close enough to walk to the house in Belmont where she lived as a 5-year-old.

Meanwhile, she doesn't know when she will have her first child -- "there's more than one person involved," she jokes -- but her eggs sit at a storage facility, waiting to be used if they are ever needed.

She'll be 35 in November, and she knows the statistics of her eggs' viability after that age. Still, in the next few years, she hopes to get pregnant naturally.

"Your frozen eggs are kind of your backup. We shouldn't rely on them," Jones said.

"I was just capturing my best eggs before that cliff hits."