“In the posh Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, in a building tucked behind a Japanese restaurant, a sleek medical office upstairs had something new on display behind glass: a 17-foot-long, 4,500-pound robotic assembly line called the AURA. It’s an artificial-intelligence-powered fertility lab, the only mechanical system in the world that can achieve all the steps in making a human embryo—at least, the steps that can be done outside a woman’s body.

The AURA has six stations that use robot arms to maneuver pipettes and petri dishes. It tracks and selects swimming sperm, singles out good eggs and merges them to create the zygote. If everything goes well in AURA’s incubator, this zygote will become an embryo and then a blastocyst that can be transferred to a patient’s uterus, hopefully to grow into a baby.

The lab, created by New York-based startup Conceivable Life Sciences Inc. …

Conceivable aims to expand access to fertility care by reducing the number of educated workers it requires and by raising the success rate for IVF, which produces live births only 37.5% of the time, according to 2022 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The company doesn’t publish birth-rate numbers yet but does say that in single cycles its prototype robots can make embryos that turn into implantable blastocysts 51% of the time. That’s equivalent to what Hope IVF can do manually.”

From Bloomberg.