Donor Tissue Counseling
An IVF laboratory has an extraordinary responsibility: caring for eggs and embryos during the periods when they must exist outside the carefully regulated environment of the human body. At Spring Fertility, that responsibility shaped how we built our laboratories. Our philosophy is simple: the egg comes first.
That means asking more than whether a procedure can be performed safely and efficiently. We ask what environment an egg or embryo experiences during each step and whether we can design the laboratory around its physiologic needs rather than asking delicate reproductive cells to accommodate the limitations of conventional laboratory equipment. That philosophy has led Spring to take an uncommon approach to some of the most delicate moments in IVF.
Modern IVF laboratories are highly sophisticated environments. Embryo incubators carefully regulate conditions during the days an embryo is developing. But eggs and embryos cannot remain inside an incubator throughout the entire IVF process. Embryologists have to work with them.
Following retrieval, eggs must be identified and handled. During conventional insemination or ICSI, eggs and sperm must be brought together. Embryos may later need to be evaluated or biopsied for genetic testing. These procedures require reproductive cells to leave the conventional incubator environment.
And that raises a question patients rarely know to ask: What happens to the environment around my eggs and embryos when they have to come out? For Spring, that question matters enormously.
In many IVF laboratories, procedures that cannot occur inside the incubator are performed at an open laboratory bench. Embryologists are highly trained to perform these procedures efficiently, and laboratories use carefully selected media and established protocols to support eggs and embryos during these periods.
One way to minimize environmental exposure is therefore to work efficiently and minimize the amount of time reproductive cells spend outside controlled incubation conditions. That is a legitimate laboratory strategy. Spring chose another approach.
Rather than accepting the open bench as an unavoidable part of embryology and designing the procedure around it, we asked whether we could extend environmental control to the procedure itself.
Spring’s laboratories use specialized enclosed workstations for all embryology procedures. Think of them as working incubators.
These systems combine the workspace, microscope and carefully regulated environment so an embryologist can manipulate eggs and embryos while maintaining controlled temperature, gas and atmospheric conditions around the dish. Instead of moving an egg from a highly controlled environment to an open bench because an embryologist needs access to it, we bring the controlled environment to the embryologist.
That allows our laboratory teams to perform meticulous, efficient work without making the amount of time outside a controlled environment the primary way we manage environmental exposure. Our philosophy is that any period of time outside the incubator should be managed to minimize environmental interruption, as though the egg or embryo had never left the controlled environment.
Eggs are extraordinarily sensitive cells. Temperature, gas concentrations, pH and culture conditions are among the variables embryologists consider when caring for reproductive cells outside the body. Changes in the surrounding environment can also influence the conditions within the media surrounding an egg or embryo.
Research suggests that these conditions can have biological consequences.¹ During ICSI, for example, researchers have demonstrated that surrounding buffer can enter an oocyte when its membrane is pierced, and that different buffer conditions can produce different cellular responses within the oocyte.¹
This is why environmental control is fundamental to modern embryology in the first place. The distinction at Spring is how far we try to extend that thinking.
There are different ways to design a laboratory workflow. One approach begins with the equipment and process available and determines how eggs and embryos can be handled safely within those constraints.
Spring started with a different question: What conditions do we want the egg to experience, and what would we need to build to maintain them?
That distinction has consequences. Specialized enclosed workstations are expensive. They require space, engineering and environmental systems. Working within them can be less convenient for embryologists than working at an open bench. They require training and technical proficiency. They can make an already exacting laboratory workflow more demanding.
We chose them anyway. Because convenience for the laboratory is not the variable we are trying to optimize. We are optimizing around the egg.
There is an important scientific distinction in how we describe this approach. No IVF laboratory can perfectly reproduce the environment inside the human reproductive tract. The human body is dynamic. Conditions change, biological systems communicate with one another, and an IVF laboratory cannot reproduce every element of that extraordinarily complex environment.
That isn’t our claim. Our goal is to create a physiologic laboratory environment: carefully controlled conditions informed by what we know about the environment reproductive cells are adapted to experience inside the body.
Temperature matters. Gas concentrations matter. Culture conditions matter. So we ask how consistently we can control those variables throughout laboratory care, not only during the long periods when an embryo is resting inside an incubator, but during the short, technically demanding moments when our embryologists need to work with it.
Our attention to environment begins when the egg enters our laboratory. From initial egg handling through fertilization and embryo development, our goal is to minimize unnecessary environmental disruption as reproductive cells move through laboratory care.
And when an egg or embryo must be actively manipulated, our enclosed workstations allow our embryologists to continue working within carefully controlled conditions. That is a subtle difference patients may never see. For us, it is precisely the kind of detail that matters.
Because sophisticated laboratory care involves tradeoffs. An open bench is easier to work at. Embryologists can compensate for environmental exposure by working efficiently and using protocols designed for those periods outside the incubator. Those approaches are widely used in IVF laboratories.
Spring made a different tradeoff. Our enclosed systems require additional equipment. They make certain procedures more technically demanding. They require our embryologists to work within a more constrained physical environment. But they allow us to prioritize something we consider more important: the environment surrounding the egg.
We would rather adapt our laboratory and our workflow to the egg than ask the egg to adapt to our laboratory.
Patients may never see most of the decisions that influence how an embryology laboratory operates. You may never see the difference between an open bench and an enclosed workstation. You may never watch an embryologist perform ICSI. You may never see the environmental controls surrounding a dish while an embryo is biopsied. But laboratory quality is built from details exactly like these.
At Spring, we don’t adopt technology simply because it is new or impressive. We invest in systems when they allow us to care for eggs and embryos in a way that better reflects our laboratory philosophy.
Sometimes that approach costs more. Sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes it makes our embryologists’ work more demanding. We believe the egg is worth the extra effort.
That is what it means to build an egg-first IVF laboratory.
1. Mendola RJ, Biswas L, Schindler K, et al. Influx of zwitterionic buffer after intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) membrane piercing alters the transcriptome of human oocytes. Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics. 2024;41:1341–1356. doi:10.1007/s10815-024-03064-2.