The INVO procedure, a simple and effective infertility treatment that uses a new device - the INVOcell - eliminates the need for elaborate laboratory equipment as required by the IVF technique and hence reduces the working cost of artificial fertilisation drastically, experts claim.

The procedure, which is practised worldwide, was performed by infertility specialists at Mumbai’s Lilavati hospital on Tuesday on an Indian woman with the help of a team of experts from the United States.

“Under the guidance of a team of US experts, we performed it on a patient and will subsequently also do it on 3-4 others soon,” Hrishikesh Pai, Infertility Specialist of Lilavati Hospital and Delhi’s Fortis Hospital, said.

Designed to enable IVF to be performed without complicated lab equipment, the technique would also make the whole procedure faster compared to the standard IVF process.

In IVF, eggs are fertilised with sperm outside the body and any resulting embryos are then left to develop in culture for 3-5 days before the best ones are transferred to the womb.

“The Invocell technique on the other hand, eggs are combined with sperm in the INVOcell device and placed in the woman’s vaginal cavity where it remains for three days,” said Nandita Palshetkar, Infertility Specialist at Lilavati Hospital and Fortis La Femme hospital here.

This step eliminates the need for a complex IVF laboratory and allows the woman’s body to provide the nurturing environment in which conception and early embryo development take place.

“Known to result in 30 per cent clinical pregnancies at a drastically reduced cost, the process can act as an intermediate step before we graduate from Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) to IVF, which results in 40-50 per cent clinical pregnancies,” Pai said.

Previous worldwide studies have stated that efficacy of this procedure is comparable to the conventional IVF.

The process can be a boon for smaller Indian towns, which face acute power shortage making implementation of the standard IVF technique heavily dependent on running generators and hence more expensive, Pai said.

“An IVF procedure costs an estimated Rs 1.3 lakh, the cost of which can be reduced substantially with the INVOcell technique. However, it will be premature to say exactly how much it can be curtailed since the procedure has not yet been established and evaluated here,” he said.

“By eliminating the need for extensive laboratories, reducing the running costs of using incubators and other equipment and also doing away with the requirement of heavy hormonal injections, the new process can cut costs enormously,” Pai added.

Besides, more people even in smaller towns can get better access to the procedure because of its relatively simple and cost-effective procedure.

The method can also undo the problem of multiple pregnancies associated with standard IVF, which involves heavy hormonal injections to be administered to patients, the doctor said.