Genetic diagnosis of embryos (PGD)

Study and analysis of your medical profile. Gynaecological exploration with an ultrasound. Hormonal analysis, if required. Seminogram, wash and selection of the sperm to validate its quality.

The couple’s disease is analysed to see if it meets the legal requirements to apply PGD.

If it is feasible to analyze the disease, you can start ovarian stimulation and for 15 days you will be injected with hormones to help grow the follicles. Each follicle will contain 1 egg.

Once most of your follicles have grown correctly, we will perfom the retrieval to aspirate them before they naturally ovulate and end up in the Fallopian tube.The retrieval is done in our operating room under sedation. You can leave the clinic on your own 2 hours later.

Once the eggs are ready, your partner will leave a sperm sample which will be washed to obtain the best spermatozoa. You can also use donor sperm (if you are a single woman, lesbian or in a heterosexual couple with a very severe male infertility factor). We will inject one spermatozoa into each egg using the ICSI technique. You will be able to see how we do it live via a camera attached to the microscope.

Having injected one spermatozoa into each egg, we will put them in a nutrient-rich mediumand leave them in an incubator simulating the conditions naturally found inside the womb. This incubator has a camera that allows us to take a photo of the egg every 5 minutes so we can see the division of the eggs, that are now embryos, without disturbing the culture conditions.

We can leave the embryos in the incubator for up to 5 days, until they reach the blastocyte stage, which is when they have the highest reproductive potential. That will depend on each patient, especially on the number of embryos obtained. If there are not a lot of embryos we can also cultivate them for 3 days.

Once we have cultivated the embryos, whether to D+5 or D+3, a tiny fragment is extracted for genetic analysis. The embryo biopsy is done in our laboratory using a very precise laser. Furthermore, you can see how we do it live, thanks to a camera attached to the microscope.

The fragments extracted from the embryos are analysed using the most avant-garde technique to date, NGS, which allows us to not only detect disease but also chromosomal alterations that could reduce their reproductive success. Once we have the NGS results, we can select the healthy embryos that do not have a risk of transmitting the disease to the next generation.

If we do the biopsy at D+5, we must freeze all the embryos and transfer them later as there is not enough time to receive the genetic results. However, if we do the biopsy at D+3, there is enough time and we can do the transfer at D+5.

Whether with fresh or frozen embryos, the transfer is the placement of the embryos inside your womb. We do it in our operating theatre, without sedation, and you can leave the clinic on your own 30 minutes later. Legally speaking, we can transfer up to 3 embryos but, case per case, we will determine the best option to obtain the best results but avoiding twin pregnancies. After the transfer, we will give you a video of the photos taken of your embryo while it was in the Time-Lapse incubator. If the treatment works and you get pregnant, this will be the first video of your future baby.

The remaining good quality embryos will be frozen for future use. The freezing process has no extra cost for you. We will keep them for two years for free, and after this period, an annual fee will be charged.