The fertilization machine became “father” of two girls in April 2023.

A Spanish startup called Overture Life has built a sperm-injecting robot that was successfully used to fertilize human eggs, which resulted in the birth of two healthy baby girls.

A description of this procedure, published in the MIT Technology Review, says the team which remotely manipulated the robot during the insemination did not have much expertise in fertility medicine. 

The engineers used a PlayStation 5 controller at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York to do the job in spring 2022, steering the robot’s tiny, mechanized in-vitro fertilization (IVF) needle to deposit single sperm cells into human eggs a few dozens of times. At least ten eggs were fertilized this way.

IVF technique is not new in the medicine world. The intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedure was developed in the 1990s.

This process involves human specialists who try to bring together a woman's egg and a man's spermatozoon using a special needle under a microscope. Sometimes this effort results in fertilization. The fertilized egg, or embryo, is inserted in a woman’s womb for development in natural conditions.

This practice is very delicate and requires a great deal of labor, therefore it is expensive - each attempt at pregnancy costs between 5,000 and 20,000 US dollars, depending on the country. 

Overture Life makes this process much cheaper and more accessible thanks to the automation of some operations. The startup has raised about 37 million dollars from investors, one of whom happens to be former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Overture Life has filed a patent application describing a “biochip” in miniature for IVF lab, with hidden reservoirs containing growth fluids and tiny channels for sperm injection. Overture Life is not alone in this highly profitable industry; AutoIVF, IVF 2.0, Conceivable Life Sciences, and Fertilis are among a few competitors to name. 

Whether the method of robot-managing fertilization will be adopted in the area of reproductive health remains to be seen. About 500,000 children are born through IVF globally each year.