Human Embryo Vitrification

Cryopreservation is one of the keystones in clinical infertility treatment and a powerful tool in each single treatment cycle to secure supernumerary embryos for later use. Over the last 15 years in particular, vitrification as an alternative approach to cryopreservation has become a well-established and globally used procedure that allows important expansion of therapeutic strategies when IVF is used to treat infertility. As an ultrafast-freezing technique, vitrification involves the use of highly concentrated aqueous solutions of cryoprotectants to enable living cells to be cooled to low temperatures without ice crystal formation during exceedingly fast cooling. Mastering the technique of vitrification of human blastocysts delivers robustness of this technology for embryo cryopreservation and allows IVF laboratories to maximize the potential for conception from any one in vitro fertilization cycle, and most importantly significantly prevents wastage of embryos. This goes even further towards best utilization of a patient’s supernumerary oocytes after retrieval, maximizing the use of embryos from a single stimulation cycle. The technology may even be used to eliminate fresh embryo transfers for reasons of convenience, uterine receptivity, elevated progesterone post-retrieval, fertility preservation, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or emergency management.