INVO Bioscience Inc (INVO)

[ANESRI]

Experimental Infertility Treatment Seems Effective, Cheaper (From 2014)




"My impression is wow, this is really interesting stuff," said Dr. Timothy Hickman, chief of reproductive endocrinology at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas. "IVF tends to be a highly complex process ... and here's a novel way to try to provide something for a certain population that can benefit. This is never going to replace an IVF lab, but maybe for a certain population it may work out right."

A second study on the INVOcell device presented at the reproductive medicine meeting indicated that the technique is also effective when eggs need to be manually injected with sperm to achieve fertilization, a procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection.

Dr. Elkin Lucena, scientific director and founder of Colombian Fertility and Sterility Center in Bogota, led research on couples who underwent 172 cycles of IVF in which their embryos were incubated in the INVOcell device for three days, with an average of two embryos transferred into the uterus afterward. Pregnancy resulted in 40 percent of embryo transfers -- roughly the same rate as conventional IVF.

"Especially from a psychological impact, couples feel they're participating in conception too and carrying their own [offspring] inside of them instead of in a lab," Lucena said. "And the cost is lowered a lot, which is making it easier for people to access these techniques."