Together. All the way.

This year, Geneva was the place to be when participating in the annual meeting of ESHRE. Similar to previous years, professionals from all over the world gathered to present or listen to the latest scientific developments in the field of assisted reproduction as well as to meet with colleagues. 

During the Vitrolife Scientific Symposium at ESHRE 2017, we had the pleasure of listening to three international experts in the field of human IVF sharing their experience in laboratory management, morphokinetics and cryobiology. We are confident that information from these presentations will assist you in not only in improving your workflow, but will help you to maximise the success of each cycle of IVF performed.

Another ASRM is over with lots of interesting new science presented. As always the programme covered a large variety of topics. In this blog I will highlight some of the studies and sessions which I found of particular interest.

Once again we can look back on the biggest event in the IVF community - the Annual Meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology. More than 10 000 people gathered in Helsinki, Finland to gain new scientific information, meet with colleagues and friends as well as explore the exhibit for new products and technologies. As usual, the scientific program is a mix of invited sessions, free communications, posters and sponsored activities. In this blog post we will make an attempt to summarise our reflections from this year’s ESHRE.

In connection to a recent post on the benefits of consistent annotation we invited readers to take a short survey on the use of annotations in their time-lapse software. Thanks to all of you who answered – here are the results.

The 11th Alpha Biennial Congress took place in the beginning of May. Vitrolife was present, together with around 400 participants. If you were not there, this blog post will give you a short recap and the opportunity to watch our Scientific Symposium "Time-lapse for improved overall IVF". 

^{Photo: Knoxville News Sentinel} 

It is with much sadness that we report the passing of Peter Mazur on December 30, 2015. Peter Mazur was a great scientist who contributed enormously to the current knowledge of cryobiology. Cryopreservation of cells and tissues has become important in not only human reproduction, but also in many other areas of medicine.

Preimplantation Genetic Screening (PGS) is a procedure designed to examine embryos for chromosomal abnormalities with the aim of de-selecting embryos with low implantation potential. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) refers to genetic diagnosis of embryos prior to transfer in cases with a known inherited disorder. Vitrolife has conducted a survey within the IVF community to determine how wide spread the use of these procedures actually is in the everyday routines. The results will be shared in this blog post.

Can you tell the difference between a validation and a clinical study? Do you know what to consider when starting a randomised controlled trial? Being author or co-author on more than 60 peer reviewed papers I have a keen interest in current regulation regarding clinical studies and will share some of my experience on conducting clinical studies in this blog post. I hope I will be able to help you sort out some of the many variables related to clinical studies and what you need to consider.

ASRM – the American Society for Reproductive Medicine took place in Baltimore, USA at the end of October. Together, the Vitrolife team covered most of the scientific sessions. The programme as always covered a large variety of topics. The continued interest in the use of time-lapse in the IVF clinic was particularly evident. In this blog post we share some of the highlights in our view.