About the Facility
- Facility Tour
- Surgery Center
- IVF Lab
- Andrology Lab
- Repoductive Imaging
- Reproductive Hormone Lab
- Cryopreservation Lab
Contact Form
*Required Fields
Laboratory Air Quality
The quality of the air in the IVF laboratory is extremely important to consistently ensure the best possible live-birth outcomes when performing in vitro fertilization. Without the purest air, IVF laboratories frequently may experience “unexplained” drops in the pregnancy rates. We are not only concerned about microbial contamination of embryo cultures, but even more so about air pollutants such as exhaust fumes from urban traffic. What we can smell in the air is what the embryos have to taste and grow in. Microscopic embryos do not yet have kidneys or livers that can protect them from tiny concentrations of chemical toxins in laboratory air.
Many in vitro fertilization laboratories filter the air for small particles through standard hospital operating room bacterial filters like the one in this picture below. Unfortunately, this is not enough, as chemical pollutants in the air (e.g. vehicle emissions) are at least 100 times smaller than the size of the pores in these filters.
Air Quality at the Frisco Institute for Reproductive Medicine
The laboratories of the Frisco Institute of Reproductive Medicine operate in some of the cleanest air in the United States enabling consistent excellent pregnancy rates without unexpected variation. The standards maintained by far exceeds the recommendations by the world governing bodies on Assisted Reproductive Technologies such as the College of American Pathologists, the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology Guidelines for Good Practice in IVF Laboratories, the European Commission Directive on technical requirements for the coding, processing, preservation, storage and distribution of human tissues and cells, the European Guide to Good Manufacturing Practices and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Guidelines for Human Embryology and Andrology Laboratories.
The Frisco Institute for Reproductive Medicine has installed very specialized air-pollution filtration systems for the IVF laboratories and operating rooms at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars to ensure that the embryos are exposed only to the purest air possible. This system includes the following:
- A customized dedicated air handling system only for the embryology laboratories.
- No mixing of laboratory air with the general office air.
- A special, raised air intake to insure the cleanest air to begin with.
- Extremely accurate air temperature and humidity control.
- Filtration of all laboratory air through dedicated air scrubbers containing potent scrubbing substances such as activated carbon and sodiumpermangenate.