Baby Born via New, Cheap IVF Screening Procedure; First of its Kind

A baby was born to a U.S. couple via a new IVF that employed a kind of screening technique, according to the University of Oxford. The latest screening technique is cost-effective and has the potential to reduce the number of miscarriages.

The healthy baby boy was born in May 2012 after a team led by Dr Dagan Wells of Oxford University picked out the best embryos created via IVF for the pregnancy. In the present study, the team collaborated with the Main Line Fertility Clinic in Pennsylvania, USA, and the fertility clinic of New York University in New York City to use the new technique on embryos of two couples who were undergoing IVF.

They looked at seven "blastocytes (five-day-old embryos). They found three healthy embryos for the first couple and two for the second.

The first pregnancy led to the birth of a healthy baby boy while the second one is due to deliver in the next few months. 

Researchers call the technique 'next-generation sequencing' which works by selecting the embryos created by IVF that confirms pregnancy.

In IVF, a human egg is fertilized with a sperm in a laboratory. Only about 30 percent embryos result in a successful pregnancy, driving up the cost of the procedure. Doctors aren't sure why only few embryos are viable and believe that genetics may play an important role in deciding the embryo's success rate.

The latest treatment is expected to reduce the cost of IVF by increasing the chances of embryo survival. The procedure identifies embryos that have the correct number of chromosomes and can cut the cost of IVF by as much as £2000-£3000 ($3000- $4,500) in the U.K.

"Many of the embryos produced during infertility treatments have no chance of becoming a baby because they carry lethal genetic abnormalities. Next-generation sequencing improves our ability to detect these abnormalities and helps us identify the embryos with the best chances of producing a viable pregnancy," Dr Wells, of the Institute for Reproductive Sciences in the Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology said in a news release.

The study findings will be presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology's annual meeting in London on Monday.

Many trials are conducted to detect chromosome numbers in the embryos. Though the trials promise a success rate of 30 percent, their use is limited due to their high costs.

Next-generation sequencing has been used in many other areas of genetic research. However, it is only now that scientists are seeing its potential to detect viable embryos in IVF.