Implant technique born in garage lab

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

An Auckland scientist has created a biological "Velcro" that makes an embryo stick to the sides of its mother's womb.

So far it has been proven only in fertile mice. But if it works in women who have difficulty in getting pregnant naturally, it could lift the success rate of implanting "test-tube" babies from 30 per cent to around 50 per cent.

The bond works for just long enough to get the embryo attached to the womb - about three days - and then dissolves naturally, leaving no lasting effects on the baby.

The inventor, 38-year-old Debbie Blake, was the first person to enrol for a doctorate when the former Auckland Institute of Technology became the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in January 2000.

Today she becomes its first doctoral graduate.

Three weeks after she handed in her thesis in March, she gave birth - by purely natural means - to her first child, Sam.

The "Velcro" is a microscopic layer of molecules that attaches to the embryo like a coat of paint and helps it to connect to the wall of the womb.

Dr Richard Fisher of Auckland's Fertility Associates said other "glues" to connect the embryo to the womb were available on the market, but Dr Blake's system appeared to be different. He could not comment further until details were published.

Dr Blake said it was a rare genuine breakthrough in science that came from bringing together two separate fields - her own specialty of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), and the science of blood groups, the field of her supervisor, Professor Steve Henry.

Auckland-born Dr Blake turned down offers to do her doctorate in top universities in Europe, the US and Australia after Professor Henry convinced her, in a Swedish cafe, that his method of creating a skin of molecules around blood cells could also work for a human embryo.

At the time, AUT was still a technical institute, had no expertise in fertility, and had no suitable laboratory. In her first year, Dr Blake worked in a garage at Professor Henry's home in Howick.



"For the first year, I was a bit worried. At one point I said to my husband, 'I don't know whether this is going to work. Should I keep going?'

"He said, 'Yes, keep going'. He has been a great support. My mother has been my unpaid lab technician for the last three years. I've had unbelievable support."

When the new process first succeeded in creating a sticky skin around a living cell, towards the end of her first year on the project, Dr Blake could hardly believe it.

"I was shocked. It was like, get away - it does work!" she said.

"In the third year of my PhD I was still thinking, 'God, it is really working, isn't it? I'm not kidding myself, am I?' "

Professor Henry, 42, spent the first 15 years of his career in blood centres in Auckland, Palmerston North and Napier. He became an expert on a rare blood type found in Maori and other Polynesian people where molecules from the colourless fluid part of blood can cross into the membrane of red blood cells.

"I thought, maybe we could make those molecules do a whole new job," he said.

He developed a system, which Dr Blake uses, with embryos that are only a few days old and about a quarter of the size of the fullstop at the end of this sentence.

She lifts them with a pencil-sharp suction device and places them in a solution for about one hour at room temperature - just long enough for molecules from the solution to attach themselves to the embryo.

Professor Henry hopes to produce a system that could be licensed for use in animals by 2007. It will take at least several years beyond that before it could be made available for widespread use in IVF clinics.