Session 42: Integrity

Session 42: Integrity

Tuesday 24 November, 2020. 8PM GMT / 9PM CET / 3PM EST

This session is kindly sponsored by ZYMŌT™

Moderators: Dr. Alison Coates  and Dr. Dara Berger

Sperm Genomic Integrity
Dr. Alessandra Parrella

Euploidy Rates and Pregnancy Outcomes Using a Microfluidic Sperm Separation Device
Dr. Anthony Anderson

Dr. Alessandra Parrella

Alessandra Parrella is a reproductive scientist and clinical embryologist at the Ronald O. Perelman and Claudia Cohen Center for Reproductive Medicine holding an academic faculty position at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. Alessandra has developed and implemented new clinical treatment in male factor infertility. One such project aims at assessing sperm chromatin fragmentation (SCF) from different levels of the male genital tract leading to the utilization of surgically retrieved spermatozoa in these men. In men with high DNA fragmentation,
Alessandra has been successful in achieving high clinical pregnancy rate by selecting spermatozoa through a microfluidic device yielding the highest portion of progressively motile cells characterized by the highest genomic integrity. Using the Next Generation Sequencing, she is currently assessing the gene expression profile of spermatozoal RNA and Proteomics in men with idiopathic infertility. Alessandra is dedicating her carrier to introducing new bioassays and to devise new treatment strategies to alleviate male infertility..

Dr. Anthony Anderson

Tony Anderson completed his Masters in Clinical Embryology studies at Leeds University, Leeds England under the direction of Professor Alan Handyside and Helen Picton. Tony’s studies focused on cryopreservation and non-invasive methods of predicting euploidy in early embryos. Tony completed his doctoral studies at a Nova Southeastern University, a private university in South Florida.
His studies included comparison of cryopreservation methods of oocytes and pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS) of embryos for optimized outcomes.

Dr. Alison Coates

Dr. Coates is currently the Laboratory Director at ORM Fertility in Portland, Oregon. She began her Embryology career in the United Kingdom in 1987. She graduated from Hull University with a BSc in Zoology, specializing in murine embryology and received her PhD in Genetics from Kent University in the UK. She is board certified as a High Complexity Lab Director. With over thirty years of experience, Dr. Coates has seen many changes in the world of IVF. She worked as an embryologist at the Hammersmith Hospital, London (where the world’s first clinical PGD cases were performed), at Leeds General Infirmary in the north of England, and in the Middle East, before settling in Portland in 1999 to create and direct the Reproductive Medicine Laboratory at ORM Fertility. Her research interests include mosaicism in blastocysts, defining which IVF patients benefit from preimplantation genetic screening for aneuploidy (PGT-A), sperm quality and its effect on embryonic aneuploidy and best practices for transfer of PGT-A screened embryos (fresh vs. frozen). Dr Coates has led several RCTs in the field of IVF, most noteworthy to determine the best transfer strategy for PGT-A screened embryos published in 2017. e in 2008-2009. She is a member of ZyMōt Fertility's Scientific Advisory Team

Dr. Dara Berger

Dara S. Berger has been in the field of reproductive medicine since 2009, and an IVF laboratory director since 2014. Dr. Berger is currently the laboratory director at the University of Pennsylvania’s clinical IVF program, Penn Fertility Care. She directs the embryology, andrology and endocrinology laboratories. She also performs all aspects of clinical embryology. Dr. Berger is the offsite IVF laboratory director at UNC Fertility. She holds a High Complexity Laboratory Director certificate from the American Board of Bioanalysis. 
In addition to her qualifications as laboratory director and clinical embryologist, she has extensive reproductive biology research experience. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in human genetics, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. Since that time she continued her passion for research by participating in projects at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine while in New York, at UNC in North Carolina, and most recently at Penn Fertility Care in Pennsylvania. Both Penn and UNC have active academic IVF programs and Dr. Berger currently teaches REI fellows and medical students at both. She is always interested in participating in translational research and teaching opportunities.