The future of egg donation-egg banks

This is one of a series of news items from abstracts of studies presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine as complied by Dr. David Meldrum, Scientific Director of Reproductive Partners. We appreciate the enormous amount of work it takes to compile and comment on these abstracts.


 whanEgg donation has been a clinical for over twenty years and has been done using eggs from a donor in a fresh IVF cycle. In the future a new method of freezing, vitrification, may make it possible to create frozen egg banks. This would allow the process to become more efficient, dividing one donor's eggs between multiple recipients.

In a poster presentation at the ASRM meeting the outcome with 90 cycles of vitrified donor eggs was compared to 112 fresh donor cycles. Term delivery occurred in 73 versus 65%. There was no statistical difference in delivery rate or mean delivery weight of the offspring. The outcome with cryotop vitrification of donor eggs appears to be as good as with fresh donor oocytesEgg banking could make egg donation less expensive by making better use of all donor eggs, many of which are now discarded after a couple is successful.