Infertility affects 17.5% of couples of childbearing age. Assisted reproductive technologies (ART), such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), are costly and complex procedures requiring advanced equipments and a highly skilled workforce. Successive embryo manipulations are a source of stress that can impact on embryo quality and viability. But developmental abnormalities and miscarriages are mainly caused by chromosomal number anomalies or aneuploidies. These can be detected by pre-implantation diagnosis of aneuploidies (PGD-A) followed by high-throughput sequencing (NGS). However, PGD-A remains complex and invasive, with embryo biopsy potentially having implications for embryo development.
The question the PhD student will have to answer is: can we design a technological alternative that enables both automated culture of in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos and their selection by non-invasive methods? The project will focus on automating embryo handling, while minimizing mechanical stress, and on extracting the extra-embryonic medium for circulating DNA analysis.
Expected results include an automated microfluidic platform for handling embryos without human intervention, extraction of extra-embryonic medium for aneuploidy analysis by sequencing, and building the program basis for microfluidic technologies applied to IVF.