Foreward
If 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. Websites can be vague, claims can be hard to evaluate, misinformation is carefully worded and significant details about donor care, sourcing and screening can be opaque or missing entirely. Our Founder/CEO, Diana Thomas, has broken down the critical differences every future parent and clinician should know before choosing a gamete bank.
So, whether you’re here seeking our services or conducting research, here are the top “must-ask questions” to guide your decision on selecting a gamete bank.
Not all egg and sperm banks are equal. Comparing guarantees, prices, and donor selections may seem like a reasonable method for narrowing your choices, but instead, ask 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 dozens of different clinics can be involved. Individual clinic employees at each outsourced 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 amount of experience held by the person who vitrifies your gametes is critical. The World Egg and Sperm Bank focuses on only vitrifying gametes. Our embryologists have vitrified every gamete in our bank; that’s over 25,000 gametes. Our results support our consistent and reliable gamete quality every day, all over the world.
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 consistent 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. When egg freezing is outsourced to many laboratories, in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. procedural consistency is impossible to manage.
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 other clinics. 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 often at least two risky transfers to storage tanks and shipping tanks in the process of getting the gametes to your clinic.
Third-party sources introduce issues with transparency and ultimately, quality. At The World Egg and Sperm Bank, we are science and data driven. Our protocols, vitrification techniques, shipping systems, 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. Other sources cannot drive their outcome improvements with data because they have no centralized location to collect the data, nor any kind of audit to verify the accuracy of the data.
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 of third parties over which they have no control? Yes, gamete bank guarantees can provide some relief if something happens, but why risk going through the uncertainty and emotional pain of loss, replacement of eggs, and rescheduling and preparing for and paying for another cycle if the process was not ideally managed in the first place?
Everyone at your full-service IVF center is busy. As the first egg bank with more than 20+ years of leadership and innovation, The World Egg and Sperm Bank has likely worked with your clinic. However, if your clinic is unfamiliar with how we procure and freeze gametes, our team is available to visit and/or train 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.
Some banks and individual fertility practices are importing gametes from offshore, third-party, or untraceable sources. All our donors at The World Egg and Sperm Bank are from North America, and we guarantee donor care, safety, and transparent screening. We maintain our records indefinitely in our single source, independently managed database. There has been a large influx from eastern European countries such as Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Cypress, South America, Africa and as far away as Uzbekistan to name only a few locations, where many people become involved in selecting, screening, verifying donor IDs, retrievals, freezing, and shipments. There is also no data on the pregnancy rates from these countries, so these gametes are highly unproven, unpredictable, and will be difficult to trace back to a donor. In addition, you will likely have to abandon any notion that you or your child can reach out to these anonymous donors in the future, should you need to.
If a guarantee is not met, most gamete banks indicate they will replace the purchased gametes, if approved. How often they must replace gametes is called the ‘replacement rate.’ The lower the replacement rate, the higher the chance that you will have good results the first time. For example, if a gamete bank has a 25% replacement rate, you have a one in four chance you will have to use the guarantee, select a new donor, wait to be rescheduled, and pay for your replacement cycle. The World Egg and Sperm Bank’s replacement rate is about 6% year after year. The best guarantee is the one you don’t have to use!
Your doctor’s clinic may receive a direct or indirect benefit from a gamete bank if that bank reimburses them for donor services or they are an investor in a specific egg bank. Ensure that you fully understand why your doctor’s clinic may recommend one gamete bank over another. The World Egg and Sperm Bank is entirely independent of all fertility clinics because we do not pay outsourced networked clinics to retrieve and freeze our donor gametes. This assures that our only focus is successful results for intended parents.
Some gamete banks create complicated refund programs and separate out the costs to appear less expensive. The World Egg and Sperm Bank is proud of our transparent pricing. We have inclusive, upfront costs and do not want our intended parents to be surprised with any hidden fees. Some egg banks are offering 100% refund guarantees, which are laden with qualifying conditions and potential costs outside of the refund program.
Pregnancy rates from different outsourced clinics may have different pregnancy rates than other clinics who freeze eggs in that same network, especially if the outsourcing is outside of North America. Since The World Egg and Sperm Bank conducts all donor procedures, including freezing, with our expert end-to-end medical and scientific staff operating in a single state-of-the-art location, our pregnancy rates are consistent and fully disclosed, because of our own in-house, end-to-end logistical control from donor recruitment to gamete delivery.
“THE ONE AND ONLY MISSION of any egg and sperm bank should be a successful, quality pregnancy. This fundamentally human aspiration should never take a backseat to cost-cutting, corporate maneuvers, or investor profits.”
Founder/CEO
The World Egg and Sperm Bank
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