A September Campus meeting organised by the SIG Fertility Preservation reviewed approaches to fertility preservation in benign conditions such as endometriosis, POI and haematological diseases.

Although some ART jurisdictions retain donor anonymity over identity disclosure in gamete donation, this protection is now in doubt. Many reports in the past few years have claimed that anonymity can no longer be guaranteed given the mass of identifying genetic information now available in ancestry databases. Jackson Kirkman-Brown explained to Focus on Reproduction how donor anonymity is rapidly becoming an impossible concept.

Mina Popovic, co-ordinator of ESHRE’s SIG Stem Cells, chaired a Tuesday session on new approaches for understanding human reproduction and improving implantation. She spoke to Focus on Reproduction on how stem cells continue to hold promise, particularly in gametogenesis.

After a year into his two-year term as ESHRE Chair, Carlos Calhaz-Jorge described the difficulties faced by the Society during the pandemic and how its attentions have now turned once more to its former principles and activities.

Following a September Campus meeting organised by the SIG Fertility Preservation, Focus on Reproduction spoke to the SIG’s co-ordinator Professor Michaël Grynberg about indications, patient suitability and limitations to success in a range of conditions, including endometriosis, POI and pre-surgery.

Following his controversial keynote lecture on ‘personalised medicine’ in ART, reproductive endocrinologist Stratis Kolibianakis spoke to Focus on Reproduction about individualised dosing in ovarian stimulation and a predicted response according to ovarian reserve. Whatever the approach, he argued, treatment should always follow the guide of strong evidence.

Denny Sakkas, Chief Scientific Officer at Boston IVF, spoke at a precongress course on emerging methods for sperm selection beyond the present standards of morphology, motility and number. Focus on Reproduction asked him if these were genuine prospects for improvement or simply more in a catalogue of ‘add-ons’.

The concept of ovarian reserve and its measurement by AMH owes much to the work Professor Bart Fauser and his group in Utrecht. In an era of more modest stimulation, Fauser asked in an invited presentation in Milan if ovarian response could indeed be predicted accurately and whether oocyte number after pick-up was a relevant factor. He explained his thinking to Focus on Reproduction.

The 30th anniversary of the Brussels group’s first ICSI report to The Lancet was marked during ESHRE 2022 with an invited symposium commemorating that original serendipitous fertilisation and the heights to which ICSI has since scaled. That first successful microinjection was performed in Brussels by Gianpiero Palermo, who spoke in Milan to Focus on Reproduction.

ESHRE now has an impressive portfolio of 21 guidelines and recommendations, the most recently published or updated on Endometriosis and on Information provision in gamete donation. Nathalie Vermeulen, who heads ESHRE’s guideline team, told Focus on Reproduction of future projects, notably on Chromosomal mosaicism in PGT, Recurrent implantation failure, guidance on the number on embryos to transfer, and Add-ons.