A treatment advance is delivering for couples unable to conceive despite round after round of IVF.
A treatment advance is delivering for couples unable to conceive despite round after round of IVF.
When Marion Hunt embarked on her seventh cycle of IVF treatment in late 2015, she told her husband that if it didn’t work, she would stop trying to get pregnant. The Auckland events manager already had one child, conceived after four cycles of IVF and born when she was 40. She knew her age meant she was even less likely to conceive a sibling for him: the IVF success rate for women in their forties is about 8% per cycle.
She admits she was “no spring chicken”. But she was determined to give it her best shot, and during 2015, she had two more unsuccessful rounds of IVF. By then, she knew time was running out – as was the couple’s money. At a cost of about $12,000 a cycle, the IVF treatment was stretching them financially
Then she heard about a new treatment available at Auckland fertility clinic Repromed. Developed at the University of Adelaide, the treatment involves incubating fertilised eggs in a culture called EmbryoGen, which contains GM-CSF, a growth factor that occurs naturally in a woman’s uterus. Repromed is the only New Zealand fertility clinic offering EmbryoGen, which costs an additional $440 a cycle.
Figuring it was worth a try, Hunt underwent another IVF cycle at the end of 2015 and her fertilised eggs were incubated in a small vial of EmbryoGen. A few days later, two embryos were transferred into her uterus.
“I didn’t have high expectations, because I hadn’t had a lot of luck in the past. I told my husband that if it didn’t work I was willing to stop.” Nine months later, Hunt’s second son was born. He’s one of eight babies born since Repromed started offering EmbryoGen to women who have had previous IVF failures or multiple miscarriages or who are older than 38. Of the first 100 women who have used EmbryoGen, another 15 are pregnant.
“It’s a group where we would expect an ongoing live-birth rate of possibly half of what we have had,” says Repromed medical director Guy Gudex.
It’s hard not to love an IVF success story, but we often forget about the millions of women for whom the treatment is not successful.
EmbryoGen is one of a number of add-on fertility treatments that have
been developed to boost women’s chances of conceiving. The growth factor it contains creates stronger, more robust embryos that can be either transferred three to five days after fertilisation or frozen for later use. It’s thought GM-CSF also helps improve communication between the embryo and the uterine lining, making implantation more likely.
“All we’re trying to do is mimic nature,” says Repromed’s scientific director, Debbie Blake. “We have found that our first group of 100 patients who used EmbryoGen have more high-quality embryos at day five than women from our mixed population.”
She says scientists have nailed the mix of nutrients embryos need to thrive while they incubate outside the body, but it’s taken longer to identify the growth factors involved.
“We’ve always known that embryos are bathed in a cocktail of growth factors inside the mother,” she says. “But there are a lot of them and we’re still learning about them. GM-CSF is one of the most investigated ones.”
According to Gudex, using EmbryoGen may have another unexpected benefit for older mothers whose embryos are more likely to have genetic abnormalities that make them less viable. His clinic is finding that embryos grown in GM-CSF are more suitable for pre-implantation genetic screening, making it possible to transfer only those that are genetically normal.
“Screening gives older women a better chance of getting pregnant and can save them from the distress of putting back an embryo that has no chance of working or will later miscarry.”
At a cost of about $3000, pre-implantation genetic screening is unlikely to become a routine part of IVF any time soon. In the meantime, women like Hunt are grateful that IVF and add-on treatments such as EmbryoGen have made it possible for them to become mothers.
“If you asked me if I would do it all over again,
I’d say yes in a heartbeat. I’m so lucky to have come out of it with these two boys.”
“If you asked me if I would do it all over again, I’d say yes in a heartbeat.”