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OverviewAbout GeriHow it worksFAQs

How Genea keeps your embryos safe while they grow

When embryos are developing in our laboratory, they need an environment as close as possible to the conditions inside your body. The GeriĀ® incubator is designed to provide exactly that, by creating a stable, warm, humidified, individually controlled environment where your embryo can develop undisturbed from fertilisation through to Day 5.

Developed by Genea Biomedx, GeriĀ® is the world's first humidified time-lapse incubator, available exclusively at Genea in Australia. Based on our own published clinical data, GeriĀ® has delivered a 12.2% increase in live births compared to traditional incubation systems.Ā¹ 

What is the GeriĀ® incubator?

The GeriĀ® is a compact benchtop incubator with six individual, independently controlled chambers. Inside each chamber, a dedicated high-resolution camera photographs each embryo every few minutes, creating a continuous visual record of its development.

This approach is a significant departure from traditional IVF incubators, which housed multiple patients' embryos together and required embryologists to remove them periodically for assessment under a microscope. Every time an embryo was removed, it was briefly exposed to changes in temperature, gas levels and light, all of which can affect its development.

With the GeriĀ®, embryos are placed inside on Day 1 and remain completely undisturbed until Day 5 and 6, when the embryologist assesses them using the time-lapse footage and selects which blastocysts to transfer or freeze.
Genea patients can watch their embryos developing in the laboratory from their own device, thanks to the world-first Growā„¢ app, exclusive to Genea. Using the time-lapse cameras inside our Geri incubators, images and videos are captured continuously and shared through the app. 

Learn more about the Growā„¢ app

The GeriĀ® incubator gives each embryo its own private, stable environment and monitors it continuously without ever disturbing it. It's designed to replicate the conditions of the human body as closely as possible. - Dean Morbeck, Chief Scientific Officer at Genea Fertility Sydney

What happens to embryos between fertilisation and transfer?


Watch the video to see an embryo develop in the GeriĀ® incubator.

Day 0 - Insemination

  • ICSI: A single sperm is injected into each mature egg, then placed in Geri
  • IVF: Egg and sperm are combined in a dish and cultured in an incubator

Why does an undisturbed environment matter?

An embryo developing in the first five days after fertilisation is extraordinarily sensitive to its environment. Small disruptions in temperature, pH, gas concentration or light exposure can affect how cells divide and whether the embryo successfully reaches the blastocyst stage.

Traditional incubation required opening the incubator to assess embryo development on Day 3, which caused brief but repeated disruptions to these conditions. The GeriĀ® eliminates this entirely. Its integrated time-lapse cameras mean embryologists can review a complete record of every embryo's cell division and developmental milestones without ever opening the incubator.

Each chamber also has its own independent sensors monitoring temperature, CO2 concentration and humidity in real time, with alarm systems that alert the laboratory team to any deviation from optimal conditions.



FAQs

The role of humidity

One of GeriĀ®'s distinguishing features is its ability to provide a humidified environment in each chamber. This matters because the natural environment within the fallopian tube, where an embryo would normally develop during its first 5 days, is warm and humid. Most traditional incubators operate in dry conditions, which can cause the culture media to gradually concentrate as it evaporates, changing its osmolality in ways that may affect embryo development.

A 2022 study found that embryos developed in humidified conditions had higher blastocyst rates, better morphological quality, and higher pregnancy, ongoing pregnancy and implantation rates compared to embryos cultured in dry conditions.Ā²

The GeriĀ® is the only humidified time-lapse incubator available in Australia, and Genea is the only clinic in Australia using it as standard practice.

Individual chambers for every patient

Each of the GeriĀ®'s six chambers is independently controlled and dedicated to a single patient. This means:
  • Your embryos are never in shared space with another patient's embryos
  • Temperature, gas concentration and humidity in your chamber are controlled independently of every other chamber
  • If one chamber needs to be opened, the conditions in your chamber are not affected
  • Each chamber has its own CO2 sensor, its own heating elements, and its own camera
 
This level of individualisation is not standard in traditional incubation systems, where a single large incubator might house the embryos of many patients simultaneously, and opening the door for one patient's embryos briefly affected the environment for all others.

Find out more


References

  1. Peura, T., Murray, A., Hesketh, N., Dalati, S., Bowman, M., & McArthur, S. (2020). Is the biggest impact on clinical IVF outcomes obtained by implementation of continuous media, time-lapse incubator or both? Fertility and Sterility, 114(3 Suppl.), e129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fertnstert.2020.08.383 
  2. Valera, M. Ɓ., Albert, C., Marcos, J., Larreategui, Z., Bori, L., & Meseguer, M. (2022). A propensity score-based, comparative study assessing humid and dry time-lapse incubation, with single-step medium, on embryo development and clinical outcomes. Human Reproduction, 37(9), 1980ā€“1993. https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/deac165 

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