BBC News, James
Gallagher, Health and Science reporter, 8 July 2013
Related
Stories
The science behind IVF is getting cheaper |
Twelve
children have been born through the technique, which replaces expensive medical
equipment with "kitchen cupboard" ingredients.
Data,
presented at fertility conference in London, suggests the success rate is
similar to conventional IVF.
Experts
said there was big potential to open up IVF to the developing world.
Cut price
Fertility
treatment is expensive. In the UK, it costs around £5,000 per cycle.
High levels
of the gas carbon dioxide are needed when growing embryos in an IVF clinic in
order to control the acidity levels. This is maintained using carbon dioxide
incubators, medical grade gas and air purification.
Instead,
the team at the Genk Institute for Fertility Technology mixed inexpensive
citric acid and bicarbonate of soda to produce carbon dioxide.
Lead
researcher Prof Willem Ombelet said: "We succeeded with an almost
Alka-Selzer like technique. Our first results suggest it is at least as good as
normal IVF and we now have 12 healthy babies born."
The
results, presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology
conference, showed a pregnancy rate of 30% - approximately the same as IVF.
The
researchers believe the cost of IVF can be cut to just 10-15% of services in
Western countries.
'Not for
everyone'
The
technique cannot completely replace conventional IVF.
It would
not help men with severe infertility who require more advanced treatment in
which the sperm is injected into the egg, known intra-cytoplasmic sperm
injection.
However,
Prof Ombelet told the BBC the aim was to bring fertility treatment to the rest
of the world.
"If
you don't have a child in Africa, or also South America or Asia, it's a
disaster. It's a disaster from an economic point of view, a psychological point
of view. They throw you out of the family. You need to help them and nobody
helps them."
Even in rich,
Western, countries many couples are still unable to afford IVF and the studies
are attracting interest.
"We've
got demand from the US already."
Geeta
Nargund, at St George's Hospital, London, is planning to introduce the
techniques to the UK: "We have an obligation to bring down the cost of
IVF, otherwise we'll have a situation where only the affluent can afford
it."
Stuart
Lavery, the director of IVF at Hammersmith Hospital in London, said the study
had the potential to have a big impact globally.
"This
isn't just about low cost IVF in west London, this is all about can you bring
IVF to countries which have unsophisticated medical services where infertility
has an incredibly low profile.
"They've
show that using a very cheap, very simple technique that you can culture
embryos and you can do IVF.
"The
weakness of the study is they've done it in a big lab in Belgium, so they need
go out and do the same study in Africa now. But if this is real potentially
you're talking about bringing IVF to corners of the world where there is no
IVF. This is enormous, the potential implications for this could be quite
amazing."
The
researchers anticipate starting out in Ghana, Uganda or Cape Town.
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