You've heard about sperm banks. Now, at long last, make room for their genetic equivalents: egg donor banks.
After years of failed attempts to effectively freeze donor eggs, a revolutionary technology has finally fine-tuned the process, giving birth to a cottage industry of banks with a growing national catalog of healthy donor eggs.
Florida stands to play a major role in the budding business, both in supplying a youthful donor pool and in generating demand from older women looking for viable options to grow their families, experts say.
"I think Florida is a fairly competitive area for reproductive medicine," said Dr. Moshe Peress, a reproductive endocrinologist in Boca Raton. "It is certainly inevitable that banks are going to establish themselves in the area, and the use of frozen donor eggs is going to be a lot more ubiquitous than it is now."
Already, of the nation's three major egg banks, two of them My Egg Bank, North America; and Donor Egg Bank USA have established direct relationships with large, reputable in-vitro fertilization centers in South Florida in recent months.
It's all been made possible by what IVF experts consider a quantum leap in an area of reproductive medicine that has lagged behind the others.
Unlike sperm and embryo preservation, freezing fragile eggs has long proven ineffective, leaving only one option for women unable to produce their own eggs: a healthy donor willing to go through the in-vitro fertilization process with them a time-consuming, expensive and emotionally taxing prospect.
But a revolutionary freezing technology called vitrification has allowed IVF specialists to freeze healthy eggs at a fraction of the time, half the cost and about the same success rate of the more laborious fresh egg donation process.
"This is the wave of the future," said Dr. David Hoffman, a reproductive endocrinologist whose Margate-based IVF Florida Reproductive Associates recently partnered with Donor Egg Bank USA to offer the frozen-egg option to patients. "It's not going to replace fresh donors right away, but it will eventually."
The revolution came in the move away from the old technology, which used a slow freeze and thaw cycle on the fragile, small, single-cell eggs. That machinery-assisted process tended to leave ice crystals in the eggs, rupturing them or breaking the sensitive chromosomal spindles in the thaw.
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Frozen egg donor banks sprout in wake of new technology