September 2, 2009

expert reaction to announcement of baby born using new egg screening technique

The world’s first baby has been born after being conceived using a new screening technique, which screens eggs for abnormalities before fertilisation, and allows selection of the best quality eggs for fertility treatment.

Prof Peter Braude, Head of the Department of Women’s Health, Kings College London, said:

“I am delighted that this patient has achieved her positive outcome after so many years of trying. However we need to be cautious as to whether the new technique was responsible. There are many seemingly exciting new technologies for embryo screening that unfortunately, when subjected to proper randomised trials, have proved to be no better than no intervention at all. Sadly in some the PGS has been shown to be detrimental. I hope that this is not the case here and would love to see a positive outcome to rigorous analysis of this technique, but at the moment this can only be viewed as a potentially very lucky result. I am aware of a similar case where a patient had previously been unsuccessful with 12 IVF treatments, only to try again with a positive result, so we have to view each instance with a level of caution until we have the rigorous data that we need.”

Mr Tony Rutherford, Chair of the British Fertility Society, said:

“”Firstly, I would like to congratulate the team at CARE Fertility for their exciting research into the use of comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH) as a means of pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS), and to wish both mother and baby well. The technology certainly offers much promise.

“In a recent review paper, the British Fertility Society found there was “no compelling evidence that PGS improves the clinical pregnancy rate or live birth rate, or that it reduces the miscarriage rate” (Human Fertility, 2008, 11: 71-75). One of the arguments put forward by the advocates of PGS is that the tests used up until now were not accurate enough and maybe CGH answers that question. However, whilst the BFS supports the application of new technologies such as array CGH, it is absolutely essential that these new techniques are subject to further rigorous research, and should only be offered to patients within the context of a robustly designed clinical trial, carried out in suitably experienced centres. The widespread use of this technology should await the outcome of such research to ensure we know which patients might benefit. All too often we see groundbreaking news about techniques that seem to offer great hope, but fail to live up to expectations when applied in widespread clinical practice.”