3-in-1 test that 'virtually guarantees IVF success' could be available within months

  • Financial cost of trying to start a family would be cut
  • Only quarter of 40,000 women who currently have IVF succeed

By allowing only the best eggs or embryos to be selected for IVF, the Oxford University test is expected to slash the odds of miscarriage and greatly boost the chances of a woman having a healthy baby (picture posed by model)

By allowing only the best eggs or embryos to be selected for IVF, the Oxford University test is expected to slash the odds of miscarriage and greatly boost the chances of a woman having a healthy baby (picture posed by model)

A three-in-one test that could almost guarantee the chance of having a baby could be available within months.

By allowing only the best eggs or embryos to be selected for IVF, the Oxford University test is expected to slash the odds of miscarriage and greatly boost the chances of a woman having a healthy baby.

This would cut the financial and emotional costs of trying time after time to start a family.

IVF costs between £3,000 and £15,000 a course, but success is far from guaranteed. Just one in four of the 40,000 women who have it each year have a baby. 

The test's inventor, Dagan Wells, said: 'It offers the possibility of enhancing success rates of IVF, allowing couples to more rapidly get to the point of having a child and avoids the heartbreak of miscarriage and termination of pregnancies affected by serious disorders.'

The new technique builds on an existing test called array comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH) which counts the number of chromosomes in an egg or embryo.

Healthy eggs should have 23 chromosomes and embryos 46, but many have more or less than this, greatly increasing the risk of miscarriage and of having a child with a condition such as Down's syndrome.

Up to three-quarters of miscarriages are thought to be due to embryos having the wrong number of chromosomes, with eggs from older women particularly likely to be defective.

'Astonishing' results released two years ago revealed array CGH to more than double a woman’s odds of getting pregnant.

The key embryo checks

Now, the technique’s pioneer Dr Wells is trying to make it even better by bolting on two other checks.

He told the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s annual conference that one involves counting the number of mitochondria – the tiny ‘batteries’ inside cells that turn the food we eat into energy.

‘We hope to fill in that gap and get closer to getting a successful pregnancy from every IVF cycle.'

- Dr Dagan Wells

The other involves checking structures called telomeres.

These are tiny biological clocks that cap the ends of chromosomes, protecting them from damage, much like the caps on the ends of shoelaces prevent fraying.

Studies suggest that short or fraying telomeres can make the difference between ‘life or death’ for an embryo.

Dr Wells said testing for three defects rather than one could take the IVF success rate from the 80 per cent or so of array CGH to approaching 100 per cent.

‘We hope to fill in that gap and get closer to getting a successful pregnancy from every IVF cycle.’

He added that his test won’t help women whose pregnancies fail because of problems with the womb. But this is not a major cause of IVF failure and other researchers are working on ways of getting round it.

Dr Wells plans to make it available to around 15 British IVF clinics within weeks.  However, initially, only the chromosome data will be used when deciding which embryos to use in IVF.

After around six months, he will look at the telomere and mitochondria data taken from the embryos at the time and see whether it also helped predict the women’s odds of becoming pregnant.

If so, he plans to make the full three-in-one test available to British clinics. It will only be available privately initially and is expected to add around £2,000 to the cost of IVF, the same as array CGH.  

The British Fertility Society has previously cautioned against the use of array CGH until there is large-scale data on how well it works.

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