Article on “Early embryo development in V-ONESTEP: a study”

The long colaboration of VITROMED with the Department of Reproductive medicine and Surgery, CMCH Vellore, India, and Cuypers & Cuypers Fertility Center Heinsberger Höfe, Heinsberg, Germany resulted in a publication on “Early embryo development in V-ONESTEP, an innovative single step culture medium used for human embryo culture: a study”. Over the years the advances in the Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ART) have been rapid and inspiring. New techniques are established and integrated into clinical practice. Several factors like the age of the patients, infertility diagnosis and ovarian stimulation protocols can influence the clinical outcome. One reason for the high in vitro fertilization (IVF) success nowadays is the development of chemically defined media for the prolonged culture of human embryos. “Back-to-nature” and “let the embryo choose” are two approaches to define the one step or sequential protocol, which allow the cultivation of human embryos from the zygote to the blastocyst stage. IVF culture media contain many components such as salts, energy substrates, amino acids, etc., but the media formulations and the concentrations of the components vary in different media. In practice, the single step protocol compared to the sequential protocol offers several advantages: less embryo handling, a stable embryo culture environment and lower costs. V-ONESTEP (VITROMED GmbH, Germany) used in this study is a single step medium for culturing human germ cells, suitable for cultivation of all developmental stages from the fertilized oocyte to the blastocyst. The aim of this study was to observe how successful V-ONESTEP is being used in ICSI treatments and how the outcome of a treatment is, in regard to pregnancy rate or life birth rate. The fertilization rate reported here was 77.08%. Our data also demonstrate, that a day 5 transfer with a blastocyst resulted in higher implantation rates compared to a cleavage stage transfer (44.3% vs 21.4%). The good results on day 5 culture confirm that V-ONESTEP medium is very well suited for long-term culture. The outcomes confirm that V-ONESTEP fulfils all the duties of a single step embryo culture medium and can be used successfully in the IVF clinics. For details see PDF.