The alternative to egg donation

Few conversations in assisted reproduction are as hard as the one where a specialist suggests egg donation. For many women and couples, hearing that recommendation after several failed cycles feels like giving up something they were not ready to let go of.

Egg donation is a valuable tool that has allowed thousands of people to build a family, and in many cases it is the right decision. The problem is that it tends to be presented as the only way out the moment egg quality is judged poor. It is assumed, automatically, that an egg which does not respond to conventional stimulation is no longer usable.

The egg is not defeated, it is depleted

The egg is the largest and most complex cell in the human body. To mature, divide properly and allow fertilisation it needs an enormous amount of energy, and that energy comes from the mitochondria.

With age, or through accumulated oxidative stress, mitochondria lose efficiency.¹ The egg then enters an energy crisis, and in a conventional cycle that looks like this:

• It lacks the strength to complete maturation.
• Fertilisation stops halfway through.
• The resulting embryo lacks the drive to divide and reach blastocyst.

In traditional IVF this is diagnosed as irreversible egg quality failure, and that is where egg donation gets prescribed. But the loss of viability is rarely down to absolute genetic damage: in most cases it is a problem of energy and structural support.

What IVF MORE® does at that point

Instead of replacing the patient’s egg with a donor’s, the technique acts on the oocyte itself to give back its functional capacity. It does not go through raising hormone doses, which is the usual route and often makes the ovarian environment worse.

There are three steps, and they are worth telling apart because they do different things:

1. Metabolic diagnosis. Each egg is measured on its own: ATP production, mitochondrial function, apoptosis markers. That is where any deficit, and its size, comes from.
2. Cytoplasmic restoration. Growth factors and energy components are infused into the cytoplasm, where the cell keeps its energy.² The nucleus, where your genetic information lives, is not touched.
3. Culture in magnetic fields. Once fertilised, the embryo develops in an environment that supports cytoskeleton organisation and favours accurate chromosome sharing.³

The embryo that results carries your DNA.

What it does not solve

This is the part an article like this almost never says, and it is exactly what you want to know before deciding.

Restoration requires at least one mature egg. If none is produced, even with stimulation, there is nothing to work on. And even when there are eggs, some do not respond. When that happens, egg donation remains the most effective alternative, and saying so in time is part of the job.

It is not a promise of pregnancy either. Reproductive medicine works with probabilities, and rates fall with age for reasons that are not explained by egg counts alone.⁴ Anyone promising you otherwise, with your own eggs or with donor eggs, is selling you something.

The order that does help

What changes is not that egg donation stops being an option. It is the order in which you arrive at it.

First, how many mature eggs can be obtained. Then, what metabolic state they are in, which is what almost never gets measured. And with that diagnosis in front of you, the decision: if they are recoverable, restore them; if not, egg donation stops being a surrender and becomes an informed choice.

If you have been told your only option is giving up your genetics, what is missing before accepting that is a measurement. Not a second opinion on the same question, but the question nobody asked.

What the metabolic diagnosis measures · Own eggs or donor eggs: how that decision gets made