Lower Cost, Better Results, World Renowned Doctor.

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.

Menu
Phone +1 (314) 576-1400
The Infertility Center of St. Louis
The Infertility Center of St. Louis
About Dr. Silber
Patient Comments
X

Groundbreaking In Vitro Maturation Research

Dr. Sherman Silber presents groundbreaking research on in vitro maturation at ESHRE 2025

In June 2025, Dr. Sherman Silber traveled to a prestigious scientific conference in Paris to present his groundbreaking research on “Robust and Simple In Vitro Maturation of Ovarian Tissue Oocytes.” Dr. Silber was invited to share the findings from this study with hundreds of fertility specialists from across the globe at ESHRE 2025, the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

The study, conducted in collaboration with Sierra Goldsmith M.S., aimed to demonstrate that in vitro maturation (IVM) of eggs from ovary tissue can be performed simply and reliably. Dr. Silber’s findings indicate that ovary tissue freezing, along with simplified IVM of eggs in the IVF laboratory, gives cancer patients two possibilities for fertility preservation, without having to delay cancer treatment.

What is in vitro maturation?

IVM is an assisted reproductive technology in which the contents of ovarian follicles are cultured in an IVF laboratory in such a way that the ooctyes, or eggs, inside the follicles develop and mature as they would naturally inside the body. These mature eggs can then be frozen and preserved for later use in IVF.

Because no ovarian stimulation hormones need to be used, this process can allow for the retrieval, maturation and preservation of eggs in females of all ages, including cancer patients and women who are not good candidates for traditional IVF.

About Dr. Silber’s IVM study

At the time of this study, 170 females had undergone ovary tissue cryopreservation since 1997. This procedure is often performed to preserve eggs prior to cancer treatment, which can negatively affect a woman’s fertility later in life.

This study focused on IFC’s 65 most recent such patients, between the ages of 2 and 38. After dissecting the ovarian cortex of the cryopreserved ovary tissue, cumulous oocyte complexes (COCs) were retrieved from culture media and cultured using varying concentrations of the hormones FSH, LH and HCG. Of 29 post-pubertal patients, the number of COCs averaged 18.2 per patient, for a total of 516 COCs. Of those, 166, or 32%, became mature metaphase II oocytes.

A third of the harvested COCs developed into metaphase II oocytes, or eggs, after their culture media was supplemented with varying HCG concentrations from 10mIU/l to 1000 mIU/l. This simplified, robust approach to in vitro maturation was not dependent on specific culture media or on gonadotropin dosage.

These findings, which align with past studies, indicate that there are three phases of oocyte maturation, and about 35% of oocytes at any given time in the ovary are in the “sweet spot” for responding to gonadotropins in vitro.

Learn more about fertility preservation and IVF

Dr. Sherman Silber’s groundbreaking new research into successful in vitro maturation opens a new avenue for fertility treatment that can allow more people to become parents, even when facing a cancer diagnosis at any stage of life. Contact us to learn more about IVF, IVM and fertility preservation at the Infertility Center of St. Louis.