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by yieldcrv 55 days ago
you can detect sex and defects in embryos now and select for them? Is this expensive?

I thought public policy was avoiding this specific thing for this specific reason, but I’ve been admittedly out of the loop

3 comments

Sex-selection has been available for quite a while. PGT-A (aneuploidy - whether this embryo is viable) has been around for a while as well. The older form of PGT-M (detecting single gene errors) has been around as well. The most modern thing is PGT-WGS which is a whole genome sequence from a biopsy of the embryo. You can do a lot of things with this like polygenic risk scores and so on. Some people even use it for IQ models though coverage for that is weak in South and East Asians (the release of the Taiwan BioBank might change this part) so it wouldn't be conclusive for my family.

Certain kinds of things like trisomy-21 (Down's Syndrome) are actually routinely screened for via things like the Maternal Serum Alpha-FoetoProtein test (primarily used for neural tube defects) or nuchal translucency (thickening could mean trisomy-21, trisomy-18, or other things), so you will know if your embryo likely has these things.

Things like this are key to countries like Denmark having a very low rate of people with Down's Syndrome since nearly all pregnancies that test positive for these are terminated.

So because many of these are routine, they're effectively free at the point of service for many pregnancies (covered by insurance) but the more advanced things require money. I have the costs laid out on the page but the test was roughly $2500/embryo for the test once the IVF lab did their thing. The IVF service was full service and $25k but we went with a middlingly expensive service.

Yes, and they can do it at six weeks, too. Downs syndrome is the common thing to be avoided that they're testing for.
Not that expensive actually