London Women’s Clinic offers patients the latest in modern technology within warm and contemporary surroundings
Innovation in conception London Women’s Clinic, number one IVF centre in London It has been more than 40 years since the birth of the world’s first ‘test-tube’ baby. While there have been few moments in the fertility landscape more ground-breaking than the arrival of Louise Brown, the advancements of the last four decades have seen a huge change in the way we approach fertility. Today, around 20,000 babies are born via IVF in the UK alone each year, with rising success rates due mainly to continuous innovation and improvement in areas such as the egg freezing process. A brief glance at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s (HFEA) clinic rankings will show that the number one centre in London is London Women’s Clinic, with a clinical pregnancy rate of 45% for every embryo transferred in women under 35 years of age and 38% in those older.
The increase in the uptake and success of egg donation is due largely to developments over the last decade in the technology used to freeze eggs. The fast-freezing technique of vitrification, developed in Japan in the 2000s, is now used worldwide at clinics including the London Women’s Clinic and its Harley Street partner the London Egg Bank, with remarkable results. Vitrification is the preferred method for freezing embryos prior to transfer and for freezing eggs prior to fertilisation.
These impressive results – in routine IVF patients – were similarly found in treatments using eggs supplied by a donor. Egg donation is an increasingly common treatment for infertile women whose ovaries are unable to produce suitable eggs, perhaps because of an early menopause or ovarian problem. For these women, a donor egg is their only reasonable chance of having a baby.
For the London Egg Bank, the ability to freeze eggs without damage to their micro-architecture – which was for many years one of the greatest challenges of reproductive medicine – has been the defining principle for its recent range of treatments. Those treatments now include elective egg freezing for the preservation of fertility and the supply of frozen donor eggs, resulting in London
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Egg Bank being the largest bank in the country with around 5,000 eggs currently available for donation. Indeed, never before in the UK have donor eggs been more plentiful or from a more varied selection of donors.
A revolution in egg donation ‘Only a few years ago most egg donation patients from Britain had to travel overseas to Spain, Ukraine or Cyprus for their donor eggs,’ explains the London Egg Bank’s medical director Professor Nick Macklon. ‘There, donors were more numerous and the supply of eggs more abundant. But all that changed with vitrification and the technology to freeze and thaw eggs without damage.’ So the London Egg Bank, with a new generation of UK-based donors, is now the largest egg bank in the country, and able to meet the treatment demands of all its patients unable to produce their own eggs.
