Doctor holding sample cup.
At Overlake Reproductive Health, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the odds of success for our patients, including new technologies for fertility treatments. One technology we’ve incorporated is a gentler way to process sperm to help our patients’ chance of success with IVF.
Traditionally, our onsite fertility lab processes semen samples using centrifugation and a density gradient medium. That method involves spinning the sample to separate out the good sperm from the bad sperm. That spinning procedure hasn’t changed much since the beginning of assisted reproductive medicine
Spinning can agitate the sperm causing them to swim more aggressively toward an egg and succeed with fertilization. But with marginal sperm, spinning may cause DNA fragmentation, which can lead to poorer pregnancy outcomes.
ZyMōt Sperm Separation Devices offer our fertility team a new option to make sure that we use our patients’ healthiest sperm and increase their odds of success. Rather than spinning, this process offers a gentler way to allow the healthiest sperm to swim through the ZyMot device to the top of the medium, so we can select the best performing sperm. Microfluidic sorting selects sperm for clinical use with reduced DNA damage. Once we have the ‘A-team’, we can use the sample in our IVF process.
ZyMōt gives our lab options. While our normal process may be fine for most patients, we believe sperm samples that have proven to be suboptimal may benefit from this new process. As a small, privately owned fertility clinic, we pride ourselves on jumping on new technology when we find it will benefit our patients’ outcome. ZyMōt is exciting for our andrologists and we look forward to making more parents with the help of this new technique.
