Connor Levy's birth brings hope to thousands of women who cannot wait to become mothers

Jul 8, 2013 18:31 GMT  ·  By

Presently, just 25% of all in vitro fertilization (IVF) attempts lead to the birth of a child. This is due to the fact that most of the embryos created in this manner carry genetic abnormalities that make it very difficult for them to develop into an infant.

The good news is that researchers are now working on perfecting a revolutionary genetic screening process, which they say will significantly up the success rate of IVF treatments.

This new IVF technique, known as next-generation sequencing (NGS, for short), has already led to the birth of a healthy baby boy.

Connor Levy was born to 36-year-old Marybeth and 41-year-old David this past June. Sources say that, despite spending almost a decade trying to conceive, Marybeth only got her child after agreeing to let doctors use this new gene screening technique to help her.

NGS basically lets specialists know whether or not an embryo has high chances of surviving once implanted inside a woman's uterus by making it possible for them to count its number of chromosomes.

Scientists explain that women implanted with embryos that do not have the right number of chromosomes (they have too few or too many) either don't get pregnant, or suffer miscarriages.

In some cases, they deliver children suffering with conditions such as Down syndrome.

With the help of this revolutionary gene screening techniques, specialists can pick and choose the embryos that are most likely to develop into healthy babies, and make sure that they are the ones implanted.

The test also lets researchers figure out whether or not a given embryo carries genes linked to various diseases, and assess how healthy the cells that make up an embryo are.

Oxford University scientist Dr. Dagan Wells, who worked on developing the gene screening technique that led to Connor Levy's birth, believes that his and his colleagues’ work will revolutionize IVF treatments worldwide.

This is because their NGS is both efficient and low cost.

It is to be expected that this technique will become widely available once several more clinical tests are carried out.