The future of IVF: Sperm-injecting robot gives birth to first babies

Two healthy embryos eventually turned into two baby girls - born with a help of a robot. (Representational)

A team of engineers from Barcelona, Spain has successfully designed and built a sperm-injecting robot that has fertilized more than a dozen human eggs, resulting in healthy embryos and the birth of two baby girls. The robot, which was used by New Hope Fertility Center in New York City, is a prototype that could be used to automate the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process in the future, potentially making it more accessible and affordable for patients who require it.

One engineer used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle and using a camera,  it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping a single sperm cell.

Two healthy embryos eventually turned into two baby girls, who researchers claim are the first ones born after fertilization by a “robot.”

The IVF process is currently performed manually by trained embryologists who handle eggs and sperm using ultra-thin hollow needles under a microscope. These labs are expensive, and the process is lengthy, delicate, and can cost up to $20,000 per attempt in the US. However, startups such as Overture Life are working towards automating the process, and Overture has raised $37 million from investors to support its work.

The ultimate goal of automating IVF is to make it more accessible and to help more people to have children. Globally, around 500,000 children are born through IVF each year, but many people don't have access to fertility medicine or can't afford it. By making IVF more affordable and less labor-intensive, entrepreneurs hope to see a significant increase in the number of children born via IVF in the future.

The concept of an all-in-one fertility machine does not yet exist, but even automating parts of the IVF process, such as sperm injection, freezing eggs, or nurturing embryos, could make the process less expensive and pave the way for more radical innovations such as gene editing or artificial wombs. Overture has filed a patent application for a "biochip" for an IVF lab in miniature, which includes hidden reservoirs for growth fluids and tiny channels for sperm to travel through. The aim is to create a system in which eggs can be fed directly into an automated fertility system at a gynecologist's office, potentially making it much more affordable and accessible.

However, it won't be easy to fully automate IVF, as it involves a dozen procedures, and Overture's robot can only perform one of them, albeit only partially. The researchers still relied on manual assistance for tasks like loading a sperm cell into the injector needle. The concept is extraordinary, but this is only the first step, says Gianpiero Palermo, a fertility doctor at Weill Cornell Medical Center who is credited with developing the fertilization procedure known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) in the 1990s.

Other doctors are also skeptical about the ability of robots to replace embryologists in the short term. "Humans are far better than a machine," says Zev Williams, director of Columbia University's fertility clinic. "You pick up a sperm, put it in an egg with minimal trauma, as delicately as possible," he says. Williams' center has developed a robot that dispenses tiny droplets of growth medium for embryos to grow in, which he says is a "low-risk" way to introduce automation to the lab.

One obstacle to automating the IVF process is that the so-called microfluidics technology, or lab-on-a-chip technology, has not lived up to its hype. Jeremy Thompson, an embryologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, says that there are still significant technical challenges to overcome before an all-in-one fertility machine becomes a reality.

However, startups such as Overture are determined to overcome these challenges and make IVF more accessible and affordable for people who require it. The current system is too expensive and too labour-intensive, and the number of children born via IVF must increase if the process is to reach its full potential.