The first babies ever made with a sperm-injecting robot reportedly were born thanks to a cutting-edge procedure that experts say could lower the cost of IVF by thousands of dollars.
Engineers used a robotic needle to insert sperm cells into eggs at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City — resulting in two healthy embryos and ultimately two baby girls, according to MIT’s Technology Review.
“It’s wild, isn’t it?” said one of the infants’ fathers, who asked to be anonymous. “Until now it had always been done manually.”
The fertility breakthrough involved using a remote-controlled needle and a camera to penetrate the eggs in a petri dish, potentially eliminating the need for highly-paid embryologists, according to the report.
The technology could one day eliminate the need for patients to visit a fertility clinic, where a single attempt at getting pregnant can cost $20,000 in the US, said Santiago Munné, chief geneticist of the Spanish company Overture Life, which developed the sperm robot.
“[IVF] has to be cheaper. And if any doctor could do it, it would be,”said Munné.
Munne believes the fertilization process could one day be automated and carried out by a gynecologist, but he didn’t elaborate on how multiple eggs would be grown and retrieved in that setting.
Overture Life has filed a patent application describing a “biochip” for an IVF lab featuring hidden reservoirs containing growth fluids, and tiny channels for sperm to swim through — and other companies are getting in the game, too.
At least half a dozen other start-ups have similar goals including AutoIVF, IVF 2.0, Conceivable Life Sciences, which aim to tap into the $25 billion IVF industry.
Alan Murray, co-founder of Conceivable Life, estimates the average IVF baby costs $83,000 in the US, when factoring in failed attempts, expensive fertility drugs and medical procedures that are largely not covered by health care.
His firm’s goal is to lower the cost 70% by increasing success rates and reducing the price of procedures with the help of robotics.
Each year, roughly 500,000 babies are born through IVF worldwide, but most people who need help having kids can’t pay for it or don’t have access to fertility medicine.
“That is the true demand,” Murray said. “The challenge is that these wonderful rich and eccentric countries can do it, but the rest of the world cannot. But they have demonstrated the true human need.”
But some fertility experts are skeptical that robotics will lower costs considering they don’t solve the problem of aging eggs — a major reason fertility treatments fail.
Rita Vassena, an adviser to Conceivable, said the field has a history of introducing innovations without significantly increasing pregnancy rates.
“The trend [is] toward piling up tests and technologies … rather than a true effort to lower access barriers,” she said.
In the case of the first babies made with the sperm robot, donor eggs were given to the patients for free and they were implanted into the mother’s uterus after the high-tech fertilization.
Overall, many fertility specialists agreed IVF robots are inevitable in the future.
“We’re going to see an evolution of what an embryologist is,” said Kathleen Miller, chief scientist of Innovation Fertility, a chain of clinics in the south.