On 12 July, we celebrated the 40th birthday of Victoria Anna, the first person conceived through in vitro fertilisation in Spain. Her birth was an achievement of the team at Dexeus Mujer’s Reproductive Medicine Unit, led by Dr Pedro N. Barri and biologist Dr Anna Veiga, who was the head of the In Vitro Fertilisation Laboratory at the time.
This achievement marked a before and after in Spain, as it consolidated the implementation of assisted reproductive technology and was crucial in promoting the development of this medical speciality. It also brought hope to many families with fertility problems, for whom there had been no solution until then.
Since the birth of Victoria Anna, Dexeus Mujer has achieved other important milestones, also pioneering in our country. These include the first birth of a child from a frozen embryo, from a donor egg, free of genetic disease thanks to the use of preimplantation genetic testing, and from an egg frozen for ovarian cancer.
Currently, more than 40,000 children are born in Spain each year in Spain with the help of these procedures, which have shown remarkable progress in just a few years. Today, all procedures follow standardised protocols and use automated systems. Dexeus Mujer was also among the first centres to use artificial intelligence for embryo selection. In terms of preimplantation genetic testing, at Dexeus Mujer we use specialised equipment including Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology, the most advanced in the field. We have also implemented a digital identification system based on QR codes to identify both patients and biological samples.
All of these advances have led to many improvements in terms of efficiency, results and patient care, with procedures now being much less invasive and safer for patients.
That is why we at Dexeus Mujer feel doubly satisfied: for achieving this milestone and for contributing to the development and social acceptance of assisted reproductive technology in our country.
We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Victoria Anna, the protagonist of this story, and all the people who have been part of it: those who have been there from the beginning and those who, day after day, continue to contribute their knowledge and efforts, paving the way for new achievements in the future. And it doesn’t always have to be a major milestone: for us, every happy ending is a success.
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