New Test Lets Women Pick Their Best IVF Embryo
New Test Lets Women Pick Their Best IVF Embryo – When sperm meets egg not every match is a winning one.
That is particularly true in the petri dishes of the scientific dating game called IVF, or in vitro fertilization. For the first two or three days after the arranged coupling, scientists carefully scrutinize the budding relationship for any signs that it has veered off course. Specialists routinely check on a candidate embryo in those early days by removing it from its incubator, placing it on a slide and scrutinizing it under a microscope. Yet that inspection process, called morphological analysis, is highly subjective, resting on opinions of individual embryologists and when they happen to look.
Barry Bahr, director of the In Vitro Fertilization Laboratory at Stanford University, has created the Early Embryo Viability Assessment test. It is the only such FDA–approved technology designed to analyze embryos and help fertility specialists select the embryo or embryos most likely to proceed to the blastocyst stage.
One day, Bahr hopes, the test could help reproductive specialists and patients choose just one egg to implant in women—the current imprecise evaluation is one reason many women implant several embryos, which can lead to twins or triplets born at low, risky birthweights or preterm.
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