A WAY of picking embryos that are more likely to implant in the womb could improve the success rate of IVF.
In a study involving 201 would-be mothers, doctors grew each IVF embryo in a separate compartment before implantation. They found that implanting embryos that secrete a chemical called sHLA-G roughly doubles the chance of pregnancy, compared with other embryos. sHLA-G may help protect the embryo from attack by the mother鈥檚 immune system, suggests team member Joel Batzofin at the Sher Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Las Vegas.
If further studies confirm the results, the test could be used routinely to select embryos, the doctors suggest in Reproductive Biomedicine Online. At the moment, fertility doctors simply pick embryos that look healthy. The test requires only a few drops of the medium in which an embryo is growing, so it should be safe 鈥� although the team has yet to confirm that embryos producing high levels of sHLA-G grow into healthy babies.
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