A strong tradition of research at EMS has resulted in more embryo culture and maturation medium research than perhaps anywhere in the world, producing several proprietary enhancements in culture medium as well as sperm processing for ICSI.  During the late summer, fall, and early winter research is a primary focus of the ICSI lab, as the recipient herd provides 2-3,000 oocytes each year for experiments to advance media formulations with large enough trial numbers to provide valid results.  This has yielded nearly yearly improvements in embryo production and, even more importantly, embryo quality, vigor, and health.  This research is a primary reason that EMS has a reputation for producing embryos that result in pregnancies and pregnancies that result in foals.

Blastocyst (embryo) production is the first number to compare.  This is generally displayed as the percentage of blastocysts produced per fertilizable oocyte, and is a good indicator of the health of a laboratory’s culture system.  Maturation and cleavage percentages are also important but don’t describe the laboratory as completely. Laboratory staff evaluation and classification of presumptive embryos is also critically important and can skew the reported blastocyst numbers, so that the ultimate test of a laboratory is the pregnancy rate of the embryos produced.

The gold standard for evaluating ICSI laboratories is the production of pregnancies and eventually foals.  The pregnancy rates for both fresh and frozen-thawed embryo transfers are vitally important, and we find that the high quality of embryos produced as well as EMS’s proprietary embryo vitrification protocol yield the highest results.  While some labs may report glowing numbers for embryo production, foal production is what really matters.