LASERS are helping embryos created in the test tube to “hatch” successfully
and reach the safety of the mother’s womb lining, say Hungarian fertility
specialists. The high-tech treatment has led to 134 births at one Budapest
hospital.
Pregnancy is often thwarted when IVF embryos fail to escape from the
surrounding zona pellucida after they are transplanted to the womb. So, just
before implanting embryos in the womb, Katalin Kanyo and Janos Konc of St John
Hospital in Budapest used 30-millisecond bursts from an infrared diode laser to
make a small opening in this covering shell. The holes help the embryos to reach
the lining of the womb, where they can develop.
The doctors used the laser-hatching method on about 300 women, all of whom
had already suffered several failures with IVF. About a third of them became
pregnant. Hatching can also be aided by physical or chemical methods, but laser
treatment is less likely to damage the embryo, says Kanyo.
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Other hospitals have experimented with similar laser techniques, but none has
followed up so many pregnancies. “Our study shows that lasers provide the
quickest, most effective and safest hatching technique,” Kanyo says.
Meanwhile, Hubert Joris and colleagues at the Centre for Reproductive
Medicine in Brussels reported success in using a similar laser to run genetic
tests on embryos created through IVF before they are implanted in the womb. The
team used a hole made by the laser to take one or two cells from embryos to
check for inherited diseases or chromosome abnormalities in high-risk
pregnancies.
