In the United States, two babies were born after in vitro fertilization (IVF) performed using a robot to inject sperm [1]. You would be the first.
The injection of the sperm into the egg was performed by an engineer “without any real knowledge of fertility medicine”. Using a PlayStation 5 controller to position a needle with a sperm, he fertilized more than a dozen eggs. Usually this process is done manually by embryologists. A “tedious and delicate” job.
After the manipulated embryos were transferred, two patients became pregnant and two baby girls were born, says Jenny Lu, an egg donation coordinator at the New Hope Fertility Center clinic in New York. In both cases, donor eggs for IVF were “made available free of charge”.
“A first step towards automating in vitro fertilization”
Overture Life, the Spanish startup that developed the robot, has raised around $37 million from investors. She sees her device as “a first step towards automating in vitro fertilization” and could make the procedure “less expensive and much more common than it is today.”
According to this company, the main goal of automated IVF is simple: “to make many more babies.”
Around 500,000 children are currently born through IVF worldwide every year (cf. Switzerland: more and more babies born through IVF). There could be many more. Some investors are almost certain that the IVF industry could grow five or ten times its current size.
Just “one small step”?
However, fully automating IVF will not be easy. It is indeed a complex procedure that requires a dozen steps. The Overture Life robot currently only performs one, and only partially.
“The concept is extraordinary, but it’s a small step,” said Gianpiero Palermo, a fertility doctor at Weill Cornell Medical Center, who notes that Overture Life researchers still rely on manual assistance for certain tasks. “In my opinion, it’s not robotic ICSI yet,” he analyses.
Other medical professionals doubt that robots can or should replace embryologists anytime soon. According to Zev Williams, director of the fertility clinic at Columbia University, “men are much better than a machine.” His center has developed a robot with a more limited goal: to deliver tiny droplets of a growth medium in which embryos can grow. The robot can shine by “releasing the same drops over and over again,” a “low-risk” way to introduce automation, the researcher believes.
“It has to be cheaper”
Not wanting to stop there, Overture Life has filed a patent for a “biochip” for a miniature IVF device. “A box that sperm and eggs go in and five days later an embryo comes out,” explains Santiago Munné, geneticist and innovation director of the Spanish company.
If IVF could be performed using his “biochip,” he said, patients might not need to go to a specialized clinic, where each attempt at pregnancy in the US can cost $20,000. “It has to be cheaper. And if a doctor could do it, he would,” he says.
Automated “microweighing” and collection system?
The company isn’t the only company interested in this space. Several startups are trying to automate the different stages of IVF.
Fertilis, an Australian start-up, has raised a few million dollars to 3D print so-called “microcradles”. They would make it easier to manipulate the ova and get connected to other devices.
Jeremy Thompson, the embryologist who founded the company, hopes that one day when doctors harvest eggs from a woman’s ovaries, they’ll put them straight into a “microcradle” and from there “robotics will mother them until they become healthy embryos.” “. “It’s my vision,” he explains.
Another company, AutoIVF, has received over $4 million in federal grants to develop an egg retrieval system called “OvaReady.” Documents suggest the company is testing a device that can locate and isolate oocytes and then “clean” them, which is currently done manually by an embryologist.
To help doctors “choose the right sperm,” Alejandro Chavez-Badiola, a Mexico-based fertility doctor, founded IVF 2.0, a company that developed image recognition software to classify and analyze sperm. “We’re not saying it’s better than a man, but we’re saying it’s just as good. And he never gets tired,” the doctor remarks. Such software will be “the brains that will power future automated labs,” he says.
Lower costs
The youngest of these startups is Conceptible Life Sciences. Jacques Cohen, an embryologist who recently joined the company, plans to create a robotic “workstation” capable of fertilizing eggs and growing embryos by the end of the year. However, he concedes that it could be some time before automation becomes a reality. “It will happen step by step,” he says.
In the United States, the average cost of having a baby after IVF is $83,000. Concognizable Life Science’s goal is to reduce costs by 70%, which the company hopes could be achieved by increasing success rates.
However, it is not certain that robotization will reduce the cost of IVF and then pass the savings on to patients (see The Business of IVF: Human Eggs Become a Commodity). In addition, automation will not solve all the problems that IVFs fail to solve, particularly that of egg aging.
Dangerous prospects
“We’re going to see an evolution in what an embryologist is,” predicts Kathleen Miller, senior scientist at Innovation Fertility, a chain of clinics. “Right now they’re technicians, but they’re becoming data scientists.”
There are even more dangerous prospects. Automating IVF could accelerate the adoption of controversial techniques such as genome editing (see Genome Editing: a Third International Summit). Although its innovation director, Santiago Munné, says Overture Life has no intention of altering the genome of unborn children, he admits it would be easy to use a robot for the purpose.
“Fertility aids” could also gradually evolve into artificial wombs (cf. researchers develop an artificial womb managed by an AI). “I think we’re going to do it,” says Jeremy Thompson. “There is credible evidence that what we thought was impossible is not so impossible” (cf. Concept to Practice, Dystopia to Reality). Some even envision being able to one day create a new society of humans on distant planets by sending these new machines into space…
[1] This is a special type of IVF: ICSI, Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, where a single sperm is injected into the egg.
Source: MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado (04/25/2023)