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Father of IVF to assist births of babies in UAE

DUBAI — The founder of Invitro Fertilisation (IVF) and this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Professor Robert Edwards, who has given hope to millions of childless couples worldwide, is set to open his first facility in the UAE.

Bourn Hall MENA will offer a range of services fully compliant with the Shariah Law. While the rate of babies born via IVF treatment worldwide is three per cent, the UAE percentage is much lower indicating a significant supply and demand gap, which the facility aims at fulfilling.

Professor Robert Edwards, also known as the father of IVF, founded Bourn Hall, the world’s first IVF clinic with physician Patrick Steptoe in the UK in 1980 after pioneering the first birth of a child conceived using IVF in 1978. Since then, over 10,000 babies have been born following treatment at the clinic.

His wife and five daughters collected the prestigious Nobel Prize for Medicine this year on his behalf in Stockholm on December 10.

As with the rest of the world, one in six UAE couples face problems conceiving, says Stefanos Fotiadis, the man who will be spearheading Bourn Hall for the MENA region.

“Infertility problems are the same everywhere in the world,” he says. “But if we look at the market, the need for treatment of the general population is not being met adequately,” he adds.

The state-of-the-art facility, that is likely to open between May to June in 2011, can treat up to 2,000 couples per year, and will offer treatment for which a large number of the local population currently prefers to travel abroad.

“Though we do not have exact figures on how many people from the UAE travel to the UK for fertility treatment, it is believed to be in hundreds,” he says, adding that closer destinations often offer cheaper treatments.

The facility in Dubai will also offer couples the option of ‘freezing eggs’ for future medical use after a federal law passed earlier this year forced fertility clinics across the country to destroy thousands of frozen embryos on religious grounds. “We will not offer gender selection as a matter of principle since we consider it unethical,” says Stefanos. The facility will employ both local fertility experts and invite teams from the UK will also offer training to the local experts while the laboratory will achieve higher standards than that of the UK, says Stefanos.

asmaalizain@khaleejtimes.com