The First Babies Conceived With a Sperm-injecting Robot Have Been Born

upstart writes:

Meet the startups trying to engineer a desktop fertility machine:

Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they'd designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop.

Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs.

The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos-and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a "robot."

[...] The startup company that developed the robot, Overture Life, says its device is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today.

[...] The main goal of automating IVF, say entrepreneurs, is simple: it's to make a lot more babies. About 500,000 children are born through IVF globally each year, but most people who need help having kids don't have access to fertility medicine or can't pay for it.

"How do we go from half a million babies a year to 30 million?'" wonders David Sable, a former fertility doctor who now runs an investment fund. "You can't if you run each lab like a bespoke, artisanal kitchen, and that is the challenge facing IVF. It's been 40 years of outstanding science and really mediocre systems engineering."

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.