for Reproductive Medicine
BREAKING FERTILITY NEWS AND EVENTS
American Society for Reproductive Medicine October
The joint meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine will be held in San Diego
during the week of October 22. Highlights from the meeting will be presented here over the next few weeks.
CHECK BACK SOON
FIRST BIRTH AFTER CYTOPLASMIC TRANSFER
The world's first birth after 'cytoplasmic transfer' has been achieved. This technique has been developed to assist
those couples whose experience with IVF has been hindered by the persistent failure to develop adequate, healthy
embryo development. It is anticipated that this technique will prove to be of great benefit for the rather sizeable number
of women undertaking IVF at age 40 and beyond who are unable to reliably develop embryos of a quality thought to
offer a reasonable chance of pregnancy success with IVF. In addition, for younger women whose embryo quality has
not been sufficient to allow for the achievment of pregnancy with IVF, this technique may offer new hope. The first
patient to deliver was a 39 year old woman with a 6.5 year history of infertility who had not conceived in four previous
IVF attempts because of inadequate embryo development.
The technique employed involved aspirating ooplasm from a donor egg into a pipette containing a sperm cell from the
male partner. The aspirated egg contents along with the sperm were transferred to the patient's egg at a very specific
location within the egg. Fourteen of the patient's eggs, which were all of poor quality were treated this way. Nine of the
fourteen showed signs of activation (early fertilization), and cleavage (cell division) took place in eight. A single
pregnancy was later confirmed following transfer. DNA fingerprinting confirmed that the female patient was the genetic
source of the pregnancy, and the mitochondria (energy packages) transferred from the donor egg had been totally
replaced by mitochondria from the mother by the 16th week of the pregnancy. In this case, only 5% of the donor
cytoplasm was aspirated and transferred. Methods are being developed to allow for an even greater amount
of cytoplasm to be transferred which should allow for even better success rates. Call us at the Fertility Institutes if you
feel you may be a candidate for this procedure, as we are taking names for our first treatment cycle expected to begin
later this year.
Most significant breakthrough publication by us involving blastocyst culture: "Successful human in vitro fertilization
using a modified human tubal fluid medium lacking glucose and phosphate ions." Published in Fertility and Sterility:
Fertil Steril 1995 Apr;63(4):922-4 PMID: 7890083 UI: 95196912 Quinn and Steinberg