Assisted Reproduction Department

The Department of Assisted Reproduction at the International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital of China Welfare Institute was established in May 2000 and is currently located in Building 3, No. 1961, Huashan Road. In 2002, it became one of the first assisted reproductive medicine centers in Shanghai to be approved by the Ministry of Health. It performs in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), providing assisted reproductive technology services to numerous infertile couples with first-class equipment, standardized management, and excellent service. The first IVF baby was born in February 2001, the first ICSI baby in April 2001, and the first baby following frozen embryo transfer in December 2001. In 2009, it was the first institution in Shanghai to implement embryo vitrification cryopreservation, greatly increasing the embryo survival rate after cryostorage and thawing.

In 2014, the Department introduced an assisted reproductive team ranked first by Expertscape, as well as the first PGD center and training base authorized by the Ministry of Health. It routinely performs all assisted reproductive technologies and has provided fertility assistance technologies to tens of thousands of families with reproductive disorders. To date, it has completed more than 1,000 PGD and PGS cycles, with a diagnostic success rate above 99% and a clinical pregnancy rate close to 50%. Its overall indicators, as well as the scale of PGD implementation for monogenic genetic diseases and the range of diseases diagnosed, are all at the forefront in China. In 2015, Shanghai’s first healthy baby following whole-genome screening by PGS was born; in 2016, China’s first “cancer-free” PGD baby from a thyroid cancer family was born using single-cell high-throughput sequencing combined with karyotype localization; in 2018, it was the first to use polar bodies one-fiftieth the size of an oocyte for genetic testing, fulfilling the dream of becoming a mother for a woman with Madelung deformity; in 2019, the world’s first healthy newborn in whom the imprinted-gene disorder Schaaf-Yang syndrome had been blocked through PGT was successfully delivered.