The rate of infertility is going up all over the world and women are getting worried about their chances of conceiving. While there are many fertility treatments that offer hope to women who wish to see a baby in their arms, they are actually time consuming and add to the agony of waiting.
The conventional IVF involves a lot of procedures like washing the eggs, moving embryos with the culture fluid causing failed treatment cycles due to changes in the temperature and acidity.
Japanese scientists have come up with a new device called ‘womb-on-a-chip’ that speedens up the process of fertility treatment by churning out early stage embryos. The miniature device actually acts like an automated artificial womb where the embryos are grown until they are ready for implantation. In fact, the endometrial calls that nourish the embryos by releasing chemicals are also grown in the womb chip mimicking the happenings in the body.
The chip is a device that is about two millimeters in which up to twenty eggs can be fertilized at a time. When tested on mice, it was found that the mice that were implanted with chip-grown embryos were more successful than the traditional IVF and developed healthy foetuses.
Dr Matt Wheeler, from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who is also working on automated IVF, says
It’s not just about more embryos surviving to be implanted, they also seem to be doing better once they are implanted.
This method of treatment is yet to be tried on humans, but if successful, could bring smiles on thousands of women who are anxious to see their ray of sunshine.
