The medical and embryology teams at Austin Fertility & Reproductive Medicine/Westlake IVF, in a collaborative study with the Department of Biomedical Sciences at The University of South Carolina Greenville, presented two research projects at the 76th annual American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) meeting in Baltimore on October 19th, 2021.
Blastocyst fluid-conditioned media (BFCM) is fluid that is extruded by a blastocyst stage embryo when the blastocyst is being cryopreserved via the fast-freeze process known as vitrification. BFCM has been an area of interest in terms of research and since BFCM is routinely discarded in clinical IVF cases, BFCM is readily available to be analyzed for research purposes.
Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) and pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A (PAPP-A) are two proteins that are typically measured in the maternal serum during pregnancy in different clinical scenarios.
“One of our two research projects showed that BFCM expresses AFP. Our other research project showed that BFCM expresses PAPP-A. Our presentations at the ASRM meeting are the first to have shown these proteins at the embryonic level,” states Dr. Shahryar Kavoussi. “This research collaboration was with Dr. Renee Chosed and her team at The University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Greenville. It was very exciting to virtually present the posters of our two most recent research projects at the ASRM 2021 meeting”.