There are only a few clinics, throughout the United States, where a woman can have her eggs frozen.
But one of those clinics recently opened in Reston.
The Virginia Center for Reproductive Medicine, located in an office park along Sunset Hills Drive, offers several different fertility services. But egg freezing is the newest, and least well-known, of those services.
Unfertilized eggs are extremely delicate and much harder to freeze than sperm or fertilized embryos. So although sperm banks and embryo banks have been around for a while, egg banks are relatively new. Worldwide there have been just over 50 successful deliveries from the procedure, most of them in Bologna, Italy, where there is a law against embryo freezing.
"The need for the service is out there, and I don't think a lot of people are aware [the service] exists," said Dr. Fady Sharara, medical director of the clinic, which opened Feb. 18.
Egg freezing is designed for women who are moving into their later child-bearing years, but who have not yet found "Mr. Right," Sharara said.
"As women get older, they start having problems getting pregnant. It starts in the 20s, then egg numbers drop even lower in the 30s. There is a free-fall in the mid to late 30s. And when they are in their 40s, very few women can get pregnant."
A FEMALE FETUS has 7 million eggs when her mother is 22 weeks pregnant. That number drops to 2.1 million when the baby is born. At puberty there are 450,000 eggs and, by menopause, no eggs are left. But eggs also decrease in quality as women age, and sometimes women are not able to conceive , even though they still have eggs.
"I see women who were in relationships that didn't pan out, whose biological clocks are ticking, and they cannot wait any longer," Sharara said. "So they end up using donor sperm. These women may meet their future mate in a year or two, but by then they have to deal with the baggage of having a child. For some men this is not a problem, but for others it is."
If a woman freezes her eggs, though, they can be inseminated in the future by whatever man she chooses.
"A 28-year-old puts her eggs into the bank," Sharara said. "Then she meets someone at 34, and can't get pregnant. But she can still use the 28-year-old eggs. Even if a woman has gone through menopause, theoretically, she can still use the eggs."
THE EGG FREEZING process can also be useful to women who have recently been diagnosed with cancer.
"At that point [in the early stages of cancer] women don't know if their eggs will survive or not," Sharara said. "When a woman goes through chemotherapy, the eggs are extremely sensitive. And in a lot of women, the eggs fail."
By freezing eggs before chemotherapy, though, a woman gives herself a higher chance of eventually becoming pregnant. The process serves, basically, as a fertility insurance plan. But the main reason egg freezing has not taken off, said Sharara, is the cost. Primarily due to the expensive fertility drugs required for the procedure, egg freezing costs around $10,000. But Dr. Naeem Iqbal, embryologist with the center, said that cost may eventually come down.
"In the early 1980s very few people knew about in vitro fertilization; test tube babies," Iqbal said. "Now many people know about it, and many people use it. The cost of IVF, 20 years ago, was $20,000. Now it is half that. Because of all the facilities that exist, you don't have to go to a special place to get that treatment."
Iqbal was involved in the first successful pregnancy and delivery from a frozen egg on the East Coast of the United States. The delivery, in Long Island, New York, came in 1998.
Sixty to 80 percent of the eggs survive the freezing process. Of those, 28 to 30 percent are successfully fertilized. In order to freeze an egg, doctors must first remove an outer layer that would normally help sperm penetrate the egg. Without that layer, the eggs harden, and doctors must give the sperm a little assistance, in order to fertilize the egg. To do that they inject sperm, under a microscope, directly into the egg. The process is called Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection, or ICSI.
So far the clinic hasn't had any egg-freezing patients, but Sharara said one woman did show interest in the procedure. More information on the clinic, and all its services, is available at www.vcrmed.com.
"We see the creation of life, step by step, on a daily basis," Iqbal said. "On day one we see the sperm moving. On day two the eggs are being fertilized. On day three the embryos are dividing. And then we transfer the embryo back into the uterus."