Everyday the amount of couples with infertility problems increases, however there are options thru Assisted Reproduction technologies known as IVF.  Couples diagnosed with male factor infertility, have available technologies such as ICSI and PICSI.  ICSI is the procedure that injects the sperm directly into the female oocyte and PICSI is the procedure to inject the best possible sperm into the oocyte.

The ICSI (Intracytoplasmatic Sperm Injection) technique consist in the selection of a sperm to be injected in the ovum to produce fertilization, but the PICSI technique improves the effectiveness of the ICSI because we choose the best sperm for its affinity to Hyaluronan which is the most important component of the crown of the ovum. The head of the mature sperm has a specific receptor of Hyalauronan that allows the mature sperm to adhere to the ovum, these mature sperms will be injected.

A synthetic substance similar to the one covering the ovum have been manufactured and is available commercially under the name PICSI, (see above figure), the PICSI dish gives the best selection of mature sperms because of its capacity to adhere to Hyaluronan, PICSI mimics the natural union of a mature sperm to the ovum which is an important step in fertilization.

In Centro de Reproducción Punta Pacífica we use this method since 2008. A study of 135 cases through the following results:

These methods help improve the quality of the embryos in patients with severe masculine factor, because in the results with conventional ICSI there are less percent of pregnancies, in comparison with the patients in which we use the PICSI technique.

In conclusion the pregnancy rate has improved with the PICSI + ICSI technique, in comparison with ICSI by 7%.
Centro de Reproducción Punta Pacífica uses state of the art technology in Assisted Reproduction, for more information visit our web site www.ivfpanama.com