The Spanish startup Overture Life has created something amazing to promote fertility: a robot driven by a Playstation controller (I kid you not) that can fertilize human eggs. It sounds like science fiction, but it's already a reality and has led to the birth of two girls in perfect health.
Come on with joypads
One of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to place a robotic needle. Observing a human egg through a camera, he then moved forward on his own, penetrating the egg and dropping a single sperm. Overall, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs.
And the unusual technique, refers the MIT Technology Review, it worked.
That's it? I can already imagine social phenomena writing things like "it's always been done". (Those who scream “aah! Robots are making our women pregnant” we just skip them). However, it is an important update to traditional in vitro fertilization, which currently involves “meeting” eggs and sperm using a special needle under a microscope.
An (electronic) hand to fertility
Traditional IVF is expensive and labor intensive, but startups like this one are working to make the process cheaper and more accessible by automating some parts of it. A welcome hand, in times of severe crisis for fertility.
“An amazing concept,” he says Gianpiero Palermo, the doctor who in the 90s introduced the assisted reproduction procedure which is most widely adopted today. “Of course, many more improvements are needed to ensure the effectiveness of the entire process.”
A prospect considered in any case very promising: for this reason Overture Life has already raised around 37 million dollars in funding from investors such as the former CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.
A long way
In summary, Overture Life is certainly an incremental step towards complete automation of the process. Almost the symbol of how a new mindset can contribute to innovating processes everywhere. Also in the field of fertility medicine.
I like to think that a new generation of doctors, hardened by long studies, will also make use of the hours of "unconscious training" spent in front of a video game.
