A recent article, published in Reproductive BioMedicine Online, compared current IVF procedures with a new, simpler lab method and concluded that both methods of culturing embryos yield similar results. This was done by American and Belgian researchers. Sixteen babies have successfully been born using this new method, and it can lead to IVF being more affordable and more available to a larger field of people.
IVF babies have been limited to less than 10% of the world population in developed countries due to the high cost of having such a child.
In this method, a reduced cost IVF culture system replaced expensive incubator systems. Despite this new method, the need for surgical egg retrieval, embryo transfer, and lab staffing and egg/embryo freezing still exists.
It is still unclear as to how much less expensive this new method will be, but there is hope that the new embryo culture method will change the philosophy in IVF of using increasingly new and complex instruments.
Photo taken by: ESTHARNIV
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