BlueGnome's 24sure technology has recently been shown to significantly increase pregnancy rates in IVF patients.
Professor Alan Handyside is Head of Preimplantation Genetics at BlueGnome.
He is well known in the field for his extensive work with Robert Winston on the first preimplantation genetic diagnosis pregnancies.
Many couples struggle to get pregnant and turn to IVF,
although IVF rates have improved over the years success rates have remained low.
New research has now shown that screening embryos prior to implantation can increase pregnancy rates.
The importance of this report from Yang et al, based at the Pacific Reproductive Centre in California, and their colleagues in Beijing,
I think is three-fold.
Firstly it's the first randomised controlled trial of 24sure technology for copy number analysis of all 24 chromosomes,
and the first indeed to show a significant clinical benefit per cycle started.
The second important aspect is that whereas we would normally associate aneuploidy screening with advanced maternal age
They chose to look at patients in a much younger age group of good prognosis
and still saw a significant benefit in terms of using the technology.
and finally its interesting because they chose to only transfer a single embryo
and single embryo transfer is now very important because one of the bad side effects of IVF can be multiple pregnancies and so anything that
improves the pregnancy rates following elective single embryo transfer
is actually very important.
The approach they took was to randomise a series of patients into two groups,
in the first group they cultured the embryos to the blastocyst stage and then selected a single embryo on the basis of morphology alone.
In the second group
they cultured embryos to day 5 and to the blastocyst stage as with the first group,
but then biopsied those embryos
and performed array analysis overnight,
allowing them to select both on the basis of morphology and on the basis of chromosome aneuploidy.
So remarkably they discovered that 45% of the embryos in which they performed the embryo biopsy, and screened them
using the 24sure technology, were actually aneuploid (incorrect number of chromosomes).
When they replaced a single euploid embryo (correct number of chromosomes) in that group of patients,
the pregnancy rate increased from 41% to 69%.
The question whether we should screen all embryos I think is certainly an interesting one
and what this study shows is that we should certainly consider
screening the embryos of younger patients because of this high level of aneuploidy.
