First Babies Conceived From Sperm-Injecting Robot Are Born Healthy
Illustration 153722974 © Maksym Yemelyanov | Dreamstime.com
Two baby girls have been born from a single sperm and donated eggs. While this doesn’t seem too out of the ordinary considering the advances of science, the main difference is they are the first humans to have been conceived by robot injection, according to an eye-opening report by MIT Technology Review.
The technology that helped bring them to life comes from Spanish startup Overture Life, which aims to automate in vitro fertilization (IVF) so that hopeful parents can expand their families more affordably and accessibly.
The ease of access is baked deep into the procedure itself. As outlined in the report, the engineers had sent their robot to a New York City clinic, called New Hope Fertility Center, via DHL. They then flew over from Barcelona and engaged the bot at the site using little more than a microscope, petri dish, mechanized needle, and a laptop.
One of the engineers, who didn’t have a background in fertility medicine, then used, of all things, a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to nudge the needle into the right direction. The smart needle identified an egg via a camera and independently inserted a single sperm cell into the egg… and about a dozen others.
When the two eggs in this story were fertilized and had evolved into healthy embryos, they were implanted into the mother’s uterus.
The girls’ father, who wishes to remain anonymous, tells the publication that he and his partner turned to the technology after several failed attempts with IVF.
IVF labs are multimillion-dollar businesses and can cost patients about US$20,000 for every attempt to get pregnant, as MIT Technology Review notes. However, some futurists now argue that the process can be automated and done more cheaply with a so-called lab-in-a-chip.
Santiago Munné, Overture Life’s chief innovation officer who is also a prolific geneticist, surmises that IVF can be as instant as putting sperm and eggs into a box, “and an embryo comes out five days later.”
Overture Life joins the ranks of several other startups that are hoping to widen the availability of options for people who are having difficulty conceiving, especially older parents. However, it appears to have raised the most in funding among its peers, with US$37 million invested from names like former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
On its website, Overture Life says it is “an embryology lab in a box that pushes IVF to a whole new level” and empowers reproductive technology “to be more economically accessible.”
The technology sounds promising, but there are a lot of complications involved, which the report extensively addresses. Not to mention, people may have a hard time trusting an autonomously sperm-injecting robot over the careful hands of a human expert.
Kathleen Miller, chief scientist of Innovation Fertility, a chain of US IVF clinics and laboratories, says the definition of what an embryologist is might change in the coming years. As of now, they’re technicians, but next time, “they’re going to be data scientists.”
[via MIT Technology Review, cover illustration 153722974 © Maksym Yemelyanov | Dreamstime.com]
