A new smartphone app could allow doctors and would-be parents receiving in vitro fertilization treatment to monitor the growth of embryos in a lab thousands of miles away.
The technology, being developed by Sydney-based Genea, is the latest example of how innovation in the global IVF industry—tipped by some analysts to be worth US$14 billion in 2020—is gathering pace. It could enable a more efficient approach to boosting the quality of embryos and the chances of successful implantation.
Merck KGaA, a German pharmaceutical-and-chemicals company with annual sales of €11 billion (US$12 billion), said it plans to sell a suite of Genea’s products to IVF clinics around the world. Included is Gavi, the world’s first machine to snap-freeze human eggs and embryos for later use, removing human error in the temperature-reducing process.
There is also Geri, an incubator for fertilized eggs that uses time-lapse photography to eliminate the potentially hazardous procedure of removing the eggs for inspection as they are forming into embryos. The agreement includes funding toward developing new technology, including to help live-stream the images from Geri to smartphones so doctors, or even patients, can monitor embryos around the clock.
“IVF has been somewhat of a black box in the past in that you wait for a phone call at the end of the week to see how your embryos are developing,” said Kim Gilliam, general manager of Genea’s research-and-development arm.
With a new system like Geri, would-be parents could watch their embryos divide and multiply on their screens, several times a day.
Time-lapse photography allows doctors and embryologists to monitor the progress of an embryo without taking it out of the incubator once a day to inspect it, a procedure that can decrease the chances of it implanting in the uterus.
The imagery also allows doctors to replay the tape to pick up anomalies that might not be apparent in the daily inspection. The information helps doctors decide which embryos are healthiest and therefore safest to implant.
Geri further reduces the need to disturb embryos by housing each patient’s eggs in one of six compartments and monitoring each with its own time-lapse camera. One mother’s embryos can be removed or added without agitating any others. Embryoscope’s platform relies on a single camera that alternates between the embryo dishes.
Time-lapse imagery was first used to record IVF incubation about two years ago after California company Auxogyn Inc. launched its embryo-viability-assessment machine designed to sit inside larger first-generation incubators—just as many laboratories were switching to more efficient bench-tops that return to target temperature more quickly after opening and closing the door. Unisense Fertilitech later offered Embryoscope, a bench-top incubator with a built-in time-lapse system.“Being able to have some more hands-on feeling in the process is very unique. I don’t think people should be restricted from that.”
At RPMG we already have available the EEVA system which uses time-lapse computer analysis to help select the embryos most likely to implant. The next step might be to link it to a phone app.