Will IVF work for a particular patient? The answer may be found in...(earchers found that the peripheral blood...)

One of the most difficult decisions for patients who have had unsuccessful IVF treatments is whether they should undergo further attempts at IVF, or if there are ways to optimise chances of success. The researchers hope that the results generated by this work will lead to the development of a test to aid in IVF decision-making. They say that their work will help to identity biomarkers that can identify events occurring at implantation, the maintenance of pregnancy and successful or unsuccessful pregnancy outcome.

"IVF technology has advanced tremendously over the past three decades, yet success after IVF remains an unpredictable outcome," said Dr. Allen. "Our work will help understand whether the implantation of embryos is influenced by the constantly changing expression of human genes."

Previous studies in the field of gene-expression have focused on single genes as opposed to genome-wide screening of all the human genes with high density DNA microarrays, as used by Dr. Allen and her team. The advent of tools like microarrays that can simultaneously probe for up to 29,000 genes has radically changed scientific approaches to this type of research. "It's like looking at how a team of players perform together rather than focusing on the individual players," said Dr. Allen.

"We intend to look further at the most significant genes we have identified as being important in this field in order to be able to understand their exact biological role in reproductive function. We hope that our work will lead to the development of a clinically useful tool to help doctors counsel their patients in the difficult decision-making involv
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