World first latest IVF Technology good news for patients

New technology, which will allow scientists to identify the embryo with the best chance of creating a pregnancy is now available to patients undergoing IVF with the Queensland Fertility Group and sister clinics MelbourneIVF and IVFAustralia.

Queensland Fertility Group’s Clinical Director, Dr. David Molloy says “This exciting development will provide patients with a significantly improved chance of achieving a pregnancy sooner than they would have using the current embryo selection techniques. Embryo selection is one of the Holy Grails of IVF. A major improvement such as this is a big step forward for patients. This is the first time in the world the Metabolomics process has been made available to patients as a routine clinical service.”

Metabolomics provides our scientists with new data to aid them in selecting the best embryo for transfer”.

When an embryo is in the laboratory it is grown in a small volume of solution which provides it with all the nutrients that it requires. It has been known for a number of years that embryos do not only remove nutrients from the solution but also release waste products back into it.  This new technology, known as Metabolomics, assesses the levels of a range of waste components in the solution around each embryo and identifies the changes that have occurred whilst the embryo has been growing and gives each embryo a score.

This Viability Score is determined for each embryo and the one with the highest score is selected for transfer back to the woman based on recent evaluation of the technology.  The team at Queensland Fertility Group, along with colleagues at its sister clinics, IVF Australia in Sydney and Melbourne IVF, have played a key role in evaluating the system.  Over a period of six months the scientific teams analysed the waste products of hundreds of embryos that contributed to the international data set used to produce the method used to generate the viability score.

Keith Harrison, Scientific Director for Queensland Fertility Group, says “Queensland Fertility Group has a long history in pioneering IVF scientific achievements in Queensland and we are so pleased that the results of international study will now translate to an even greater chance of success for people requiring treatment.”

Current methods used by scientists to identify the embryos with the greatest potential of achieving a pregnancy involve observations such as growth rate and appearance. 

Each day the scientists look at every embryo and give them a grading. The first aspect of each embryo that is determined is the number of cells within the embryo.  The number of cells in an embryo should increase on a daily basis and there is an ideal growth rate that the scientists like to see.  For example on the second day after egg collection 4-cell embryos are considered ideal, whilst on the third day 8-cells are preferred.  Of course the scientists are only looking at the embryos for a very short period of time and therefore embryos that are slightly slower can grow immediately after being looked at and as such are certainly able to achieve pregnancies.

As well as looking at the number of cells within the embryo, the scientists look at a number of other characteristics to give each embryo a morphology grading.  The grade is made up of factors such as the appearance of the cells within the embryo and the presence of any fragmentation. Whilst these gradings do provide information on which are probably the better embryos more likely to achieve a pregnancy, there is no guarantee that the best grade embryos will result in an on-going pregnancy or a live birth.

Keith Harrison, Scientific Director for Queensland Fertility Group, concludes; “We are hopeful that, by combining our existing embryo assessment techniques with the metabolomics analysis, we will have better ability to select the embryos that are more likely to create a pregnancy with a minimum number of treatments.”

Patients wishing to learn more about this new technology and what it means for them should contact their Queensland Fertility Group Specialist.  New Patient enquiries should be directed to our dedicated nursing team on 1800 QFG IVF (734 483)