Egg Freezing: A Proven Process for Preserving Your Fertility

You’ll self-administer injectable hormonal treatments for about 10 to 14 days to stimulate your ovaries to produce multiple mature follicles/eggs.

Eggs are retrieved from your ovaries through an ultrasound-guided follicle aspiration. You will receive sedation for this procedure.

Your eggs are frozen with vitrification, a fast and effective method of freezing eggs. It involves using a high concentration of cryoprotectant to prevent ice crystal formation and rapidly freezing the eggs to form a glass-like solid. This technique is superior to traditional slow freezing methods and helps to protect the egg during the freezing and thawing process.

Your eggs will remain frozen in a liquid nitrogen storage tank in our embryology laboratory until you’re ready to conceive. The liquid nitrogen tanks are constantly monitored by an alarm system, ensuring their preservation at a temperature of -196 degrees celsius around the clock.

Once you’re ready to conceive, you’ll undergo a short course of hormone treatment to prepare your uterus for the upcoming embryo transfer. These hormones prepare your uterine lining for the implantation of your embryo(s). Embryo transfer can also be timed according to your menstrual cycle (natural cycle transfer).

Our embryologists thaw your eggs by rapidly placing them in a warm solution containing a cryoprotectant, which prevents the formation of ice crystals. The eggs are then washed in a series of solutions to remove the cryoprotectant and placed in a culture medium before the ICSI procedure.

Our experienced embryologists fertilize your egg through Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI). During this process, the embryologist uses a thin glass pipette to immobilize a single sperm, draws it into the pipette, and then injects it directly into the egg’s cytoplasm. Since the egg is the size of a pinpoint, this sophisticated technique requires a high-powered microscope, tiny glass pipettes, and instruments that translate hand movements into extremely fine movements of the pipettes.

After your embryo(s) grow in the lab for three to five days, we choose one embryo to transfer into your uterus. We specialize in elective single-embryo transfer (eSET) — the process of transferring only one embryo into your uterus — as this method reduces the risk of multiple pregnancy, thus increasing your chance of a healthy pregnancy and baby.