Auxogyn, Inc., a privately held medical technology company focused on women's reproductive health, today announced that it acquired an exclusive license from Stanford University to develop a set of products that may allow medical practitioners in the field of assisted reproduction to significantly improve the effectiveness of in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures.
The technology licensed from Stanford is described in a publication titled 'Non-invasive imaging of human embryos before embryonic genome activation predicts development to the blastocyst stage,' now appearing in the online edition of Nature Biotechnology.
This landmark study demonstrated, for the first time, that human embryo fate is already determined at the four-cell stage of development. The article is authored by Professor Renee Reijo Pera, Dr. Connie Wong, Dr. Kevin Loewke, Dr. Nancy Bossert, Dr. Barry Behr, Dr. Christopher De Jonge and Dr. Thomas Baer and showed that measuring a unique set of non‑invasive imaging parameters by day 2 may allow an embryologist to predict the embryos that will reach the blastocyst (day 5) stage of development with a very high degree of accuracy.
"Blastocyst formation is a critical time point in human embryo development and provides more objective criteria for selecting which embryo(s) to transfer," said Lissa Goldenstein, president and chief executive officer of Auxogyn, Inc. "For years, researchers have searched for ways to predict the embryos most likely to reach the blastocyst stage in order to enable earlier transfer and ultimately improve live birth rates for in vitro fertilization procedures."
"Building on the technology licensed from Stanford, we are developing a product that assesses early embryo viability at the 4-cell stage. We believe that generating key clinical data assessments may enable embryologists to improve the effectiveness of in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures while providing women experiencing infertility the highest quality of patient care," continued Ms. Goldenstein.
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