The embryos travel to meet with their parents

At the 34th ESHRE Annual Meeting, Institut Marquès, worldwide leading centre of Gynaecology and Assisted Reproduction, has presented the results of its Distance Ooycte Donation (DOD) programme in the cycles carried out during two years in collaboration with the Livet centre of Turin.

At Institut Marquès we work constantly to provide our patients with our pioneering and cutting-edge treatments. Among other things, we want to avoid them travelling to carry out all assisted reproduction treatments as much as possible.

The Distance Oocyte Donation (DOD) programme is an Institut Marquès’ initiative that makes it possible to undergo an in vitro fertilisation without the patient having to leave her country of origin. Currently, Institut Marquès offers this possibility thanks to its centres in Spain, Ireland and Italy and the joint work with collaborating centres.

That protocol is as follows: in the country of origin, the partner’s semen sample is frozen and shipped to our laboratory, where the donor’s fresh oocyte is fertilised with the most advanced technology. The system of the phenotype matching between donor and patient is a priority for Institut Marquès in order to assign the most suitable donor. Once the embryo is fertilised, it is vitrified and shipped back to the country of origin, where the patient’s doctor carries out the transfer to the uterus. That is, the embryo travels to meet with their parents.

Specifically, in this communication at the ESHRE Annual Meeting we present the results obtained by Institut Marquès with the DOD programme in collaboration with the Livet centre in Torino. These results are excellent because it is a pioneering program where we exclusively work with fresh eggs and with the best technology. Institut Marquès has carried out a clinical study of 215 DOD cycles performed in collaboration with the Livet clinic during 2 years, between May 2015 and May 2017. The results show that the pregnancy rate obtained with the DOD programme is 64.6% per embryo transfer; the live birth rate is 52%; the miscarriage rate is only 12.6% and the multiple pregnancy rate drops to 0.9%.

In the countries where remote egg donation is not feasible, Institut Marquès offers the Just For Transfer programme. It is an alternative option where patients ship the semen sample to our laboratories in order to fertilise the fresh oocyte. This way, patients must only travel to carry out the transfer.