More than a dozen human eggs were successfully fertilized by a sperm-injecting robot created by a team of engineers from Barcelona, Spain, leading to the development of healthy embryos and the birth of two baby girls.
Two healthy babies were born after Overture Life, a Spanish firm, successfully fertilized human eggs with a robot sperm injector. MIT’s Technology Review report states that the sperm controller may be operated with a PlayStation controller.
The robotic needle was controlled by engineers using a PlayStation 5 controller to fertilize the eggs. In New York City, the surgery was carried out.
One of the engineers who worked on creating the first insemination robot had little background in reproductive technology. They could use a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to aid in the development process.
Using a specialized controller, a startup’s engineering student successfully guided a tiny, mechanized needle during in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. Individual sperm cells were carefully placed into human eggs over a dozen times using this method.
The report verified that these infants are the first known people to be born using automated technology-assisted fertilization.
“I was calm. “I thought at that precise moment, ‘It’s just one more experiment,” Eduard Alba, the mechanical engineering student who operated the sperm injector, said.
In addition, the business claimed that its product is a first step toward automating in vitro fertilization (IVF), which may make the process significantly less expensive and more widespread than it is at the moment.
Currently, in vitro fertilization (IVF) labs are typically run by highly qualified embryologists who can make over $125,000 per year and meticulously manipulate sperm and eggs with the help of ultra-thin hollow needles and powerful microscopes.
Furthermore, the report noted that Overture had received $37 million in funding, mainly from Khosla Ventures and Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube.
Experts claim that this is only the first stage of the process becoming automated.
“The concept is extraordinary, but this is a baby step,” Gianpiero Palermo, who developed the now-commonplace intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedure in the 1990s, was quoted as saying.
He added that Overture’s engineers still had to manually load sperm cells onto the injector needles, which means “this is not yet robotic ICSI.”
Doctors continue to express doubt about the future viability of replacing embryologists with robots. The director of Columbia University’s fertility clinic, Zev Williams, stated, “For now, humans are far better than a machine.” Because no one wants to entrust an embryo—a potential person—to a microdevice where it might become trapped or harmed by something as tiny as an air bubble, IVF is still done manually.
