Screening embryos can increase the success rate of older women having fertility treatment, a leading fertility expert said on Thursday.
Dr. Yury Verlinsky, of the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago, told a medical conference that screening embryos before transferring them to the womb increased the take-home baby rate from 11.5 percent to 81.4 percent.
“We’ve been advocating preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to be done for every IVF (in-vitro fertilization) cycle,” he said.
PGD is used to detect single gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis, a hereditary lung disease, during test tube baby treatments.
But Verlinksy told the Sixth International Symposium on Preimplantation Genetics in London that the technique could also be used to select the embryo that is most likely to implant in the womb and result in a live birth.
Screening for chromosome problems
Verlinsky and his team screened embryos for aneuploidy — chromosome duplication — which increases with age and is a cause of recurrent miscarriage.
Chromosomes, found in the nucleus of every cell, contain genes that determine the characteristics of an individual.
Verlinksy and his colleagues discovered a by-product of chromosome division that can be used to identify aneuploidy. They used the findings to choose embryos that would have the optimum chance of implanting and resulting in a live birth.
It is just one of many developments in genetics and fertility treatments that experts say will bring new hope to couples with problems conceiving and inherited disorders.
“We are seeing a transformation in infertility care, embryo diagnoses which now cover hundreds of disease genes and stem cells promising to cure innate or induced disorders,” said Professor Robert Edwards, who with Dr. Patrick Steptoe developed IVF that led to the world’s first test tube baby in 1978.
“Together these offer an amazing cocktail for future medicine,” he added.
An estimated one in six couples suffer from infertility.
About 500 fertility experts and geneticists are attending the 3-day meeting.
