Gary Smith, a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, together with a team of researchers at the university, designed a device that imitates the experience an embryo would have in the fallopian tube during a natural pregnancy.
The device creates natural motion for the embryos, similar to what an embryo would normally experience while travelling through the mother’s body.
This particular study, carried out using embryos from mice, showed that embryos that were rocked during IVF led to pregnancy 77 percent of the time, as opposed to 55 percent of the embryos that were not rocked.
The results seem to indicate that embryos respond to the environment they are stored in before they are transferred to the woman’s uterus. These particular researches believe this information could be ground-breaking in terms of how embryos are stored and dealt with in the future of IVF.
“One of our goals for years now has been to modify how we grow embryos in the lab to be more like how they grow in the human body, because we know that the human body grows them most efficiently,” Smith told LiveScience.
This research could lead to major improvements to infertility treatment. The current success rate of IVF – a costly and many times difficult treatment – is only around 35 percent.
“If we could increase that, even just to 45 percent, that’s significant,” said Smith.
Read the full story from LiveScience here.
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