Chennai, June 16: Nearly a year after they delivered the country’s first baby born out of frozen oocyte (egg), city-based GG Hospital has touched another milestone, with a second woman conceiving through the procedure. And this time, it is twins. Doctors at GG Hospitals say that they have now moved on to a “sophisticated” rapid freeze technology after which they thawed the eggs, and injected it with a prepared sperm before implanting it in the uterus.
When the blood test reports of 41-year-old Sowjanya (name changed) turned positive, doctors could not stop smiling. “Frozen egg is a procedure that has seen more failures than success. There are less than 1,000 babies from around the world. We have been working on frozen oocytes since 2005. One year after we first succeeded, we are happy to see the second pregnancy,” says fertility specialist Dr Priya Selvaraj.
Sowjanya, who had failures with insemination programme, was referred to the donor egg programme where doctors would use donated eggs to be fused with her spouse’s sperm. But on the day she presented herself, the hospital had no fresh donors, who were suitable for her.
However, less than 36 hours ago, they had frozen eggs of a young woman. The donor, who was also undergoing treatment for fertility, was given hormonal injections to stimulate ovulation and produce multiple eggs. Once the eggs matured, they were removed under anaesthesia.
“While in the earlier instance, we did a slow freeze, where the cells were dehydrated and passed into different cell preservatives, in the rapid procedure, the cell is passed through preservatives in less than 12 minutes and plunged into liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees centigrade,” said Dr Selvaraj.
Out of the 10 eggs frozen, six were thawed. Since the shell of the eggs are hard, intra cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) was manually done, injecting the sperm into the eggs with a special ultrasound needle. We then supported her with hormones,” says Dr Selvaraj. In two months, the blood and urine reports showed positive for pregnancy.
Doctors admit the success of the procedure can only be assessed after the woman’s delivery. There have been concerns that the freezing and thawing process could disturb the chromosomal structure in these cells and result in abnormalities in the embryos evolving from such eggs. “The health of the first baby born from frozen eggs at our hospital was good. We hope this one would be healthy too,” she said.
—Agencies–