First Babies Born from Genetic Screening Study

JBeukema

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Apr 23, 2009
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The births, as well as several ongoing pregnancies in the study group, are the final stage in the "proof of principle" that the screening of oocytes and embryos before transfer in IVF can increase birth rates; both these pregnancies were derived from oocytes whose complete chromosomal status had been assessed by microarray CGH.
The study, which was conducted in Bologna, Italy, and Bonn, Germany, was designed and organised by a task force of ESHRE to determine the clinical value of CGH as a non-subjective means of genetic screening before embryo transfer.
"We have learnt from more than 30 years of IVF that many of the embryos we transfer have chromosome abnormalities," explains ESHRE's chairman Luca Gianaroli. "Indeed, it's still the case that two out of every three embryos we transfer fail to implant as a pregnancy, many of them because of these abnormalities.
"The whole world of IVF has been trying to find an effective way of screening for these abnormalities for more than a decade, but results so far have been disappointing with the technology available. Now we have a new technology in array CGH and our hopes are that this will finally provide a reliable means of assessing the chromosomal status of the embryos we transfer."
The microarray CGH technique as evaluated in the ESHRE study has several advantages over other methods:

  • CGH tests all 23 pairs of chromosomes in a cell, and not just a limited number (as in former methods)
  • The cell tested (known as the polar body) is taken from an oocyte at fertilisation, and so does not require biopsy of a cell from a developing embryo for its analysis
  • Earlier chromosome tests were on cells biopsied from growing embryos and did not necessarily reflect the total status of the embryo (because of chromosome "mosaicism"); polar body analysis removes this potential problem
  • Other CGH tests on biopsies from five-day-old embryos require several days to deliver complete results -- and thus require the freeze-storage of the embryo before it can be transferred; polar body CGH can be done in real time and does not require freezing

First babies born from genetic screening study
 

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