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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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How Vitrification Safely Freezes Eggs: Jana’s Story at the Infertility Center of St. Louis (Part 4)

Episode 4 of Jana’s eight-part egg-freezing series takes viewers inside the cryobiology lab at the Infertility Center of St. Louis, where Dr. Sherman J. Silber demystifies vitrification—the breakthrough that turned elective egg preservation from gamble to reliable safety net. He begins with basic cell physics: human oocytes are about 70% water. Traditional slow-freeze methods let that water crystallize, puncturing membranes and rupturing the delicate spindle that arranges chromosomes, so post-thaw survival hovered around 50%. Vitrification solves the problem by first replacing most intracellular water with an “antifreeze” cryoprotectant and then plunging the egg into liquid nitrogen at –196°C. The cooling rate—over 20,000°C per minute—locks the fluid into a glass-like solid before ice crystals can nucleate.

Dr. Silber recalls that his team was among the first in the United States to implement the technique in 2003 after early collaboration with Japanese pioneers. Within months, survival rates for both eggs and embryos shot to 95–98%, and subsequent studies confirmed no increase in chromosomal abnormalities or birth-defect risk. Jana watches as embryologists load her straws into the clinic’s FDA-approved biometric cryovault; each scan creates a time-stamped audit trail ensuring her oocytes cannot be mixed up or lost.

The episode links hard science to personal impact. Because vitrification preserves cellular integrity, eggs maintain the pregnancy potential of the age at which they were frozen. For Jana, that means her 30-year-old eggs will perform like 30-year-old eggs even if used at 40. Dr. Silber cites center data showing cumulative live-birth rates exceeding 70% when 15–20 mature oocytes are thawed, fertilized and transferred over one or more IVF cycles. The segment closes with Jana expressing relief that cutting-edge cryobiology and meticulous lab protocols stand guard over her future family plans, reinforcing the series’ theme: technology plus trust equals peace of mind.