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Infertile patients cannot afford to wait for treatment while their eggs get older.

Dr. Sherman Silber, Infertility Center of St. Louis, is offering video consultations for patients who need to plan now for their treatment while stay-at-home orders are in place. He is talking to and evaluating patients in their home to comply with social distancing measures.

Dr. Silber is discovering that patients actually prefer this method of telemedicine consultation over the conventional office visit. Patients have conveyed that “it is so much more convenient and less stressful” to have a telemedicine personal consultation than to take a day off from work to travel to the doctor’s office and sit with other nervous patients in the waiting room.

The COVID-19 pandemic is thus changing much of the way we will do things in the future, and for the better. “Our patients are surprisingly much happier with this approach. Of course, at some point we need to perform hands on treatment. But with this new manner of seeing patients, we can come to the right diagnosis and treatment plan for most patients more efficiently, quickly, and painlessly, with no loss of personal one-on-one communication.” This is a very welcome new era of telemedicine that has been forced on us by the current difficult times.

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The Infertility Center of St. Louis
The Infertility Center of St. Louis
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One-Step Vitrification: Freeze Eggs & Embryos Flawlessly – Dr. Silber at ESHRE 2025

Addressing the European Fertility Society meeting in Paris, Dr. Sherman J. Silber recapped how his Infertility Center of St. Louis imported and then upgraded Japan’s revolutionary vitrification technique—the flash-freeze method that turns eggs or embryos into a glass-like solid before ice crystals can form. When Silber first evaluated the method in 2003, thawing a single oocyte demanded a painstaking 20-minute step-down through four warming baths, while freezing took several hours of serial dilution. His laboratory engineers trimmed those multiple transfers to one rapid immersion and one rapid re-warming, cutting hands-on time to mere seconds without compromising cellular integrity.

The “one-step” protocol uses ultra-high cooling rates (≈20,000 °C/minute) plus a non-toxic cryoprotectant blend that replaces most intracellular water. Because ice never nucleates, spindle fibers, mitochondria, and zona pellucida remain undisturbed. Post-thaw survival and blastocyst-formation rates now exceed 95%, matching fresh outcomes while slashing labor costs by roughly 40%. Lower lab overhead makes banking affordable for more patients, and shorter exposure to cryoprotectants reduces theoretical toxicity risks.

Silber highlights clinical payoff: a woman can freeze 30-year-old eggs, store them a decade or longer, and enjoy pregnancy prospects indistinguishable from her biological age at retrieval. Couples can likewise bank embryos after their first child and return years later to expand the family, confident viability and chromosomal health remain intact. Because the method avoids high-dose hormones during repeated stimulations, cumulative estrogen exposure drops, lowering side-effect profiles.

Dr. Silber argues that flawless vitrification democratizes fertility preservation. By eliminating micro-cracking, simplifying workflow, and shrinking costs, the St. Louis refinement expands access beyond elite metropolitan centers to regional clinics worldwide. The result is an era in which proactive egg or embryo storage—once experimental and expensive—becomes routine, reliable, and economically sensible for anyone planning ahead for parenthood at 40, 50, or beyond.