The rapid growth of Genetic Science enables the couples – and especially those with a serious family history – to bear healthy children.
Thanks to Pre-implantation Genetic Testing, those fertilized oocytes which have chromosomal aberrations and genetic diseases can be detected and precluded so that only the healthy ones will be transferred in the woman’s uterus.
The procedure is not very different from a cycle of In Vitro Fertilization cycle, except that it includes the biopsy of the embryos in the embryology lab. With the process of biopsy, a few blastomeres (cells) from the growing embryos are isolated and analyzed in an appropriately trained genetic lab.
The biopsy of the embryos is performed in different stages
- The 3rd day post oocyte collection, to those embryos at approximately 8 cells was the first method to be used
- The 5th day post oocyte collection, to those embryos at the blastocyst stage. The blastocyst biopsy is gaining more and more interest and tends to replace the day 3 biopsy, as it has many advantages as a method.
- Alternatively, polar body biopsy has been suggested to check the quality of maternal genetic material without intervening to the embryo, but due to limitations of the method it is not used routinely.
The most common procedure following the biopsy technique is to freeze the biopsied blastocysts within a short period of time, until receiving the final results from the genetic laboratory. The embryo transfer is performed in a subsequent cycle, when women have an optimal endometrial preparation, with only the suggested embryos, so that to gain a healthy pregnancy.
Our embryologists’ training in the technique has already started since 2000 and continues until today with the most sophisticated educational protocols.