EP 115: Professor Simon Fishel explains chromosomal abnormalities, miscarriage markers and the importance of personalised medicine

Professor Simon Fishel is the Founder, President and Head of R&D at CARE Fertility in the uK. CARE is celebrating its 20th anniversary and apparently a CARE baby is delivered every 4hours!

Simon’s early works was as Deputy Scientific Director of the world’s first ‘test-tube baby clinic’ at Bourn Hall, Cambridge, the first to demonstrate that embryos are capable of responding to their environment and communicating with the uterus and external factors. In our chat, we discuss what this means.

Simon was also the first to show that the human embryo in vitro synthesises and secretes the pregnancy hormone HCG (Science, 1984), and early in the 1990’s he was the first to demonstrate conclusively the need to permanently immobilise the sperm tail for efficient and successful ICSI in humans, and during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s he pioneered human sperm microinjection.

We discussed the efficiency of the endometrial scratch as well as eating pineapple post embryo transfer.

Simon also gave his views on studies regarding Vitamin B3 and it’s impact on preventing miscarriage. One in particular was in Australia, where scientists identified a major cause of miscarriages and multiple birth defects that could change the way women prepare for pregnancy.

Having low levels of a vital molecule called Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD) damages embryos in the crucial first weeks of pregnancy when organs start forming, the scientists at Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute have discovered.

Simon has said – “While an intriguing and potentially important scientific study, which has been well conducted, it must be recognised that miscarriage has many causes.”

In our chat Simon disucsses CARE’s research which has shown a Male Marker for miscarriage and explained the blood test that could be carried out to determine whether a couple are carrying the marker.

We also discussed the mental health aspect of failed fertility treatment and Simon gave his views on the postcode lottery in the UK, as well as how he feels IVF is looking in it’s 40th year of existence.

It was interesting to hear him say ” I have a great sadness that in the country that created IVF and made it available to the world that we still can’t have a single unified policy”

To follow Simon on twitter visit

I also referred to a previous episode I had released where I had covered the impact of fertility treatment on mental health, with blogger Strength and Infertility which you can visit here

Don’t forget to join my closed facebook group

Plus if you don’t mind helping me out, a quick review on iTunes and clicking subscribe to this podcast would be AMAZING… just click here

The post EP 115: Professor Simon Fishel explains chromosomal abnormalities, miscarriage markers and the importance of personalised medicine appeared first on The Fertility Podcast.

Source: The Fertility Podcast