The IVF Lab of the Future By Dr. Zev Williams, MD, PhD

We hear a similar story in our clinic at Columbia University Fertility Center on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times a day. Patients come in, oftentimes scared and anxious, with the same goal, growing their family. Maybe they’ve had challenges getting pregnant that they can’t explain, or multiple miscarriage, or know right away they need reproductive help, which is the case with many of our LGBTQ+ patients. The good news is that they’ve taken the first step. They’ve come to see me, Dr. Zev Williams, a physician-scientist working with an incredible team to advance reproductive medicine to help those who otherwise couldn’t have success in building their families. 

Infertility is regrettably, both very common and rarely discussed. As a result, there are many couples feeling very alone, but the unfortunate reality is that infertility is a common problem affecting about one in five couples. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in the field of fertility for multiple decades, pioneering many of the in vitro fertility (IVF) technologies readily available today. IVF is a beautiful, complicated, detailed and amazing field – and at Columbia University Fertility Center, we are pioneering cutting-edge technologies that make us truly the IVF lab of the future. 

Simply put, IVF consists of a variety of medical procedures that harvests both eggs and sperm, followed by other lab procedures where an egg is fertilized by sperm. Once fertilized, the egg becomes an embryo and healthy embryos can be stored for later use or implanted in the uterus to hopefully turn into a pregnancy.

Until recently at Columbia University Fertility Center, the process of egg fertilization was done by hand by embryologists, specially trained scientific staff who work in the IVF lab and care for our patients’ eggs, sperm and early embryos. The embryos are cultured on specialized cell culture plates in tiny droplets of media, which is a liquid containing the nutrients embryos need to survive. Preparing the plates for embryo culture is a critical step in the embryo culture process. 

While we had seen success with approach, the Columbia University Fertility Center team recognized that preparing embryo culture plates was something that a robot could do better than a human, and it would also allow our incredibly skilled embryologists and technicians to dedicate more time to those tasks that they could do better than a robot. Over the course of a year and a half, we developed the robot technology to handle this crucial step and currently use it for all IVF fertilization in our clinic in NYC. As a result, the plate making robot is ten times more precise and accurate at preparing the media droplets in the embryo culture plates and avoids human error. This technology provides better consistency and reproducibility in the culture conditions to better optimize embryo growth and development. This technology is part of our continuous efforts to give our patients the best chance at success and we do not charge patients additional for it. Columbia University Fertility Center is the only fertility center to have developed and implemented this technology.

We’ve also developed a test called STORK, which stands for short-read, transport, rapid, karyotyping, which uses a hand-held DNA sequencer to test biopsies embryos produced using IVF on-site for the presence of extra or missing chromosomes (aneuploidy) in a couple of hours. Currently, embryo biopsy samples must be shipped to a reference laboratory and results take over a week to come back.  As a result, a patient must freeze her embryo(s) and wait an entire month before she can have the healthy embryo transferred back into her uterus. With STORK, the embryo can be biopsied in the morning, we can have the results by lunch, and the embryo can be transferred that afternoon. It has the potential to save thousands of dollars and priceless time. While it is currently awaiting FDA review and clearance so we can use it on patients, we are incredibly exited about this new advancement.

One of newer technological improvements that is currently in-use with our patients is the Columbia University Fertility Center-developed PreBaby Monitor. We are proud of the fact that we house all our patients’ precious eggs, sperm, and embryos in-house, use multiple layers of safety and redundancy. For those patients who want the peace of mind we created PreBaby Monitor, which allows patients to check-in on the temperature of the tanks holding their embryos whenever they like. It provides them with an extra sense of security. 

If you, or someone you know is struggling with infertility, we would love to help. Columbia University Fertility Center is one of the preeminent academic fertility centers in the world. We offer a unique model of having a boutique-level care for patients, a high-volume IVF lab that gives incredible success rates and the level of research and innovation that you get from a talented research team at a leading academic university. 

Zev Williams, MD, PhD is the Wendy D. Havens Associate Professor of Women's Health and the Chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He completed his MD and PhD training in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before continuing to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Massachusetts General Hospital for his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology. After completing his fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at Weill-Cornell, Dr. Williams then did a post-doctoral fellowship on RNA biology in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Tuschl at Rockefeller University. As a physician scientist, Dr. Williams' focus has been on helping those suffering from recurrent pregnancy loss and infertility and developing novel technologies and treatments to improve patient success.