Metabolomic profiling of embryo culture media to predict IVF outcome

Decreasing multiple gestations while maintaining or improving overall pregnancy rates remains one of the most significant contemporary goals in the treatment of infertility. This necessitates an improvement over our current methodology for embryo assessment that is largely based on morphology and cleavage rate. Multiple studies of animal and human embryos have demonstrated that metabolic activity of in vitro grown embryos reflect their reproductive potential. Recent studies suggest that assessment of embryo metabolism by noninvasive metabolomic profiling of embryo culture media may provide a useful adjunct to morphologic embryo assessment and improve our ability to determine the reproductive potential of individual embryos.