Stimulation free IVF

[BS001]

Hi all,

I’m a researcher that’s been developing a faster and much more natural way of doing IVF. Essentially, instead of giving all of the hormone injections to your body to make eggs develop, you take out immature eggs and give them what they need in a petri dish.

There are pluses and minuses to it: the plus side is you skip all the hormone injections / blood and ultrasound monitoring, and can jump right to egg collection. It would also be potentially cheaper, without all the fertility drugs. The downside is you get fewer usable eggs per cycle as it more heavily relies on the number of immature eggs your ovary recruits (3-10 eggs for an average patient), and the chances of having a baby is 10-15% lower compared to normal stimulated IVF.

We think this form of IVF could be a good option for quick first cycle attempts and people that want to avoid hormone injections/save money, but we’re curious whether this is truly worth trying to bring to clinical settings.

Does this sound like something you’d be interested in (or would have been interested in trying at the time of doing IVF if done already)?

Would love comments, and please let me know if you’d be open to talking more — would super appreciate it!!

I would be very interested! What an amazing subject to research.

For Most if not all women going through infertility and ivf it's the "numbers" which are most important - anything which reduces your chances - and 10-15% is a lot - is going to be enough to put most women off.
Also realistically is it really going to be that much cheaper??? I did short protocol ivf so my drugs only cost £900 which isn't that much compared to my bill of £6.5k and there is going to be a cost associated with maturing eggs in lab with your method so I can't see how it would work out much cheaper?

If you go on any ivf support group most of us talk about how many eggs we had collected and how many made it to blast - we re all painfully aware that you can have a top quality blast transferred which doesn't implant so most of us want to have a few back up eggs/blasts from a cycle

Natural ivf is already available with many clinics

Good luck with your research

My personal opinion would be a definite no

Once you've got to the stage of needing ivf you would do anything to increase your chances of it working. A 10-15% drop is massive and I wouldn't even consider it.

My conversation with the consultant was what could I do to increase the chances of it working...

Meaning this as nice as possible I hope the nhs doesn't take this on and us it as money saving which would mean it works for less people ☹️

I'm curious as to what 'giving them what they need' in a Petri dish involves seeing as though immature eggs have been discarded for all the years IVF has been well established, what developments have been made to mature immature eggs outside of the body?

To consider trying a cycle under that system, the cost reduction would have to match the predicted success rate reduction!

The general success rates of IVF are only around 30% so to reduce this by 10 - 15% is very low. I think I would have considered it had I been younger but now I'm 35 going on 36, I wouldn't take the risk

Do you mean a 10-15 percent drop in success, rather than a 10-15 percentage point drop? (i.e. if you have a 50% chance under standard IVF, your new chance would be 43-45%). If so, that sounds good to me.

A lot of people don't like the idea of taking lots of drugs - or can't - which I guess is why natural IVF and mini IVF are growing in popularity.

I have often mused about what fertility treatment will look like in 20-30 years time, since the advances even in the last couple of years are amazing. In my mind they will eventually find a way of removing a few hundred eggs at a time - out of the millions that are sitting there but are not yet growing - and completely mature them outside the body making sure they cast off the right number of chromosomes.

Egg maturation already exists and is proven to not be as effective as IVF even in women with PCOS who produce lots of immature eggs. So my answer would be Hell no.