Raising young eggs to cure female infertility

In the second quarter of 2006, Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City will apply mature techniques of young eggs in vitro. Thus, infertile women due to polycystic ovary syndrome will be able to be mothers.

Master Vuong Thi Ngoc Lan, Deputy Dean of Tu Du Hospital, said that maturing young eggs in vitro is a new technique, currently only 4 countries successfully applied are Korea, Denmark, Japan and Canada.

According to Dr. Lan, there are many causes of female infertility: endometriosis, injured oviduct, weak sperm, ovulation disorder. Among ovulation disorders, there are 75% caused by polycystic ovary syndrome, most common in women of reproductive age. These women were infertile due to no ovulation; want to treat must use hormonal drugs to stimulate ovulation - get mature eggs for in vitro fertilization. If you do not use the medicine, the egg removed is definitely a young egg.

With the new technique, patients with polycystic ovaries do not need drugs to stimulate the ovary but still fertilize . The doctor pokes young eggs through the vagina, cultivating in a special environment outside the human body for about 24 hours to mature and fertilization by sperm injection technology into oocytes. That's IVM technology, a new method that has been around for 10 years. The difficulty in this technique is to create an egg-raising environment - the secret that all countries hide. Taking young eggs is also very difficult, must use special needles to get tiny follicles in the mobile ovaries.

The advantage of IVM method is cost saving (reduction of 1/3 compared to conventional in vitro fertilization due to non-injectable stimulation of the ovary), completely avoiding ovarian hyperstimulation, shortening time treatment and reduce the time to monitor patients. In terms of price, compared to IVF technique, IVM has to add the mature stage of eggs about 200-300 USD, but on the contrary do not use drugs so it does not cost 15-20 million VND. If calculating an entire IVM compared to IVF, one third of the cost for patients will be reduced.

There are about 300 babies born from techniques of raising young eggs worldwide . To date, there have been no reports of an abnormal increase or developmental disorder in these children. With Tu Du hospital, to deploy mature egg technology, the two biggest problems are the technique of sucking and the environment to grow eggs outside the body. The hospital has been monitoring and synthesizing world information on this technique since 2000, and in 2004 sent 2 doctors to study in Korea. Around February 2006, these two doctors will go to Japan to study and complete the final stages and months later the hospital will deploy.