World's first babies conceived using sperm-injecting robot; Will it be lowering IVF costs?

In a fascinating breakthrough, two baby girls were born after being fertilized by a sperm that came from a robot. According to MIT Technology Review, the whole ordeal started last Spring when engineers in Barcelona created a sperm-injecting robot and sent it to the New Hope Fertility Center in New York. At the centre, the sperm was injected inside an egg by a robotic needle. The engineers used a random Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position the robotic needle which conducted the penetrating process under a microscope. 

According to an MIT tech review, the process was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs. The researchers claim that the two babies who were born out of this process are the world’s first babies born after fertilisation by a robot. “I was calm. In that exact moment, I thought, ‘It’s just one more experiment,’” said Eduard Alba, a mechanical engineering student who commanded the sperm-injecting device. The name of the startup company that spearheaded the whole process was Overture Life. The company believes that this initiative will make IVF procedures less expensive and more accessible to people who want to have kids but are unable to conceive naturally. 

Aims to carry out IVF in a desktop instrument

IVF process in the US and around the world is a multimillion-dollar affair and is staffed by trained embryologists who earn upwards of $125,000 per annum. But startups are planning to make the whole ordeal cheaper and much easier. “Think of a box where sperm and eggs go in, and an embryo comes out five days later,” Santiago Munné, the prize-winning geneticist and chief innovation officer of Overture Life, told MIT Technology Review. Munné aims to carry out  IVF treatment inside a desktop so that patients will never have to visit an expensive clinic. However, the lack of specialised experts involved in the proposed IVF process can turn out to be a matter of concern, since it's about a life at the end of the day. 

So far the company has raised a whopping $37 million from investors including Khosla Ventures and from the former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. Hence, it will be interesting to see how these babies will be and how far this technology will get developed.