First babies conceived using PlayStation-controlled robot are born
A Spanish startup has managed to use a sperm-injecting robot to fertilize human eggs, successfully resulting in the birth of two healthy babies.
Engineers with no experience in fertility medicine used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to get the robotic needle to fertilize more than a dozen eggs.
Healthy embryos from this experiment have now resulted in the birth of two baby girls — the first people to be born from a ‘robot’ fertilization.
‘I was calm. In that exact moment, I thought, “It’s just one more experiment”,’ Eduard Alba, the student mechanical engineer who controlled the sperm-injecting device, told MIT Technology Review.
The robot was developed by Overture Life, a company that’s working towards automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
About 500,000 children are born through IVF globally each year but it’s an expensive and inaccessible process for many who need it.
Currently, IVF labs cost millions of dollars, staffed by trained embryologists who are paid over $125,000 a year to delicately handle sperm and eggs using ultra-thin hollow needles under a microscope.
Automating parts of the process, like injecting sperm, freezing eggs, or nurturing embryos, could make IVF less expensive.
‘Think of a box where sperm and eggs go in, and an embryo comes out five days later,’ Santiago Munné, a prize-winning geneticist and chief innovation officer at Overture Life told MIT.
On average, people in the UK pay £13,730 for their IVF. The average cost of IVF for same-sex couples is 17% higher than for heterosexual couples (£15,512 vs £13,276), according to Gaia, an IVF insurance company.
Researchers believe that if IVF could be carried out inside a desktop instrument, patients might never need to visit a specialized clinic. Instead, a patient’s eggs could be fed directly into an automated fertility system at a gynaecologist’s office.
‘The concept is extraordinary, but this is a baby step,’ Weill Cornell Medical Center fertility doctor Gianpiero Palermo, who pioneered the intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedure in the 1990s, told MIT Technolgy Review.
Still, it signals a breakthrough in fertility medicine where the future could look very different.
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