FOREWARDIf you read one page on our website, it should be this one. There is a lot of misinformation being circulated, misleading patients and IVF clinics alike. The founder of The World Egg Bank and pioneer in the frozen donor egg industry, Diana Thomas, has broken down the critical differences every parent and clinician should know before choosing an egg bank.
Not all egg and sperm banks providing gametes are equal. Comparing guarantees, prices, and donor selections may get you nowhere. One must ask themselves; how does this gamete bank manage its quality? If you cannot be assured that the highest standards of ethics and quality are the bank’s priority, then guarantees, pricing, and donor selection are the least of your worries.
Other banks often outsource donor recruiting, screening, retrieval, freezing, and transport services. Sometimes more than a dozen different clinics can be involved. Individual clinic employees at each out-sourced clinic location are continuously in transition, and new training must occur with each new employee. These outsourced clinics are busy with their own patients and meeting their patients’ needs. How can egg retrieval and gamete freezing — which is likely a secondary priority at many of these clinics — guarantee donor care, safety, and transparent screening while ensuring gold standard quality?
The World Egg and Sperm Bank is completely unique. We have built a state-of-the-art egg and sperm bank that only focuses solely on donor gametes. We do not run a multi-service infertility practice and are not distracted by patients and treatment options. Instead, we focus strictly on the needs and care of our donors and the quality of our gametes–without the diversions associated with a patient’s infertility treatments. The World Egg and Sperm Bank uses specialized laboratory systems and staff. All donations, retrievals, and vitrifications are done with our proven protocols at our singular location, ensuring we manage quality.
The amount of experience held by the person who vitrifies your gametes is critical. There is a learning curve associated with vitrification; due to the precision required when placing the gamete on the vitrification device, thousands of repetitions without distractions are crucial to consistently high-quality standards. For someone with less experience, small amounts of drift from the original protocol can add up to large amounts of variability in gamete quality. If an out-sourced network clinic laboratory is busy with their own IVF patients, the critical timing of the steps from retrieval to vitrification can be easily overlooked. At The World Egg and Sperm Bank, we focus on only vitrifying gametes, and our embryologist has vitrified every gamete in our bank; that is over 10,000 gametes. Our results support our consistent and reliable gamete quality every day, all over the world.
Gamete banks who outsource to network clinics introduce additional risks. Carefully controlling the storage and shipment of gametes after they are vitrified is key to quality and success. Moving gametes from a storage tank to a shipper is a delicate matter, as gametes can ‘warm’ within seconds. The World Egg and Sperm Bank ships your gametes once – directly to your clinic. There are no middlemen or distribution hubs. That may not be the case with gamete banks who outsource to affiliates. Instead, their gametes can be transferred from a retrieval clinic to a storage location and later transferred to the clinic of the intended parent. That is potentially three shipments and two transfers to storage tanks in the process of getting the gametes to your clinic.
Third-party sources introduce issues with transparency and ultimately, quality. Other banks can try to take every precaution possible, but if the process is out of their hands, how can they manage the people, processes, and quality at third parties over which they have no control? Yes, gamete bank guarantees are there if something happens, but why risk going through the uncertainty and emotional pain of loss, replacement, and rescheduling if the process was not ideally managed in the first place?
At The World Egg and Sperm Bank, we are science and data-driven. Our protocols, vitrification technique, shipping system, and all related technical and operational systems are monitored to improve the quality of your treatment. The World Egg and Sperm Bank can accomplish this because we do it all under one roof using our purpose-built database.
Everyone at your full-service IVF center is busy. Usually, a clinical team will default to what’s easy and suggest a gamete bank they are familiar with. With their focus on patients and treatments, they may lack the time and opportunity to understand the differences among gamete banks and their operational practices. As the first egg bank with more than 30 years of innovation, we’ve likely worked with your clinic. However, if your clinic is unfamiliar with how we procure and freeze gametes, our team is available to visit your clinic and demonstrate The World Egg and Sperm Bank difference that comes from setting the highest ethical standards and the gold standard in quality!