The first baby born in the UK using a pioneering fertility screening treatment that could help IVF treatment be more effective is now a healthy four-month-old boy.
Biagio Russo was born to Ewa Wybacz, 36, and Sergio Russo, 42, after a course of IVF which used "next-generation sequencing".
The process allows doctors to easily and cheaply choose the embryos which have the strongest chance of growing into healthy babies and has "huge potential" for improving fertility treatments, Professor Dagan Wells told The Times.
New mother Wybacz was told she would not be able to have children after a childhood bout of appendicitis.
She was helped by the new treatment which can boost the chance of pregnancy for women in their mid-30s to almost 80 per cent.
About half of the embryos produced in IVF have the wrong number of chromosomes which, even if they do result in a pregnancy, can lead to complications,
Until the introduction of this sequencing which rapidly counts chromosomes, the only way of checking was for doctors to manually count and identify problems.
But the process is expensive and as a result is only taken up by one in 20 women.
Prof Wells introduced the process to Britain after the first "next generation" baby was born in America three years ago.
"New genetic tests have huge potential for improving fertility treatments," he said.
"Our aim is to bring these tests within reach of all patients undergoing IVF, not only the wealthy."
