One of the most frequently asked questions by patients undergoing oocyte donation treatment is: will the donor look like me? To answer this question, one of the terms we use is the anglicism “matching”, which means pairing or coinciding.
One of the most important stages in an egg donation process is to find the ideal donor for the patient. To do this, our team specialised in matching carries out a very rigorous search among all the donors to select only those who are compatible with the patient. When we talk about compatibility, we do so from a phenotypic point of view and from a genetic point of view.
HOW IS THE MATCHING BETWEEN DONOR AND RECIPIENT CARRIED OUT?
At Ovoclinic, we have a large pool of donors of different phenotypes and nationalities thanks to Ovobank, our own egg bank. Ovobank donors are girls between the ages of 18 and 33 who are in good health, both physically and psychologically. This is checked after undergoing a series of thorough gynaecological, psychological, serological and genetic examinations. In our clinics, we only accept 34% of the donors, those we consider suitable after passing the aforementioned tests.
Thanks to new technological advances and the study of the exome, more than 50,000 mutations in more than 2,000 genes can be analysed, which allows patients who wish to request this study to carry out the treatment with complete safety and confidence and thus fulfil the long-awaited dream of patients to start a family.
Another selection screening is carried out by Ovobank’s specialised team, which is responsible for phenotypic matching with the recipient patient and the donor. If patients wish, they can request the Genetic Compatibility Test (GCT), which allows the genetic information of the donor to be analysed with that of the recipient woman’s partner, with the aim of reducing the transmission of genetic diseases. This information will be compared by selecting the ideal donor, so that patient and donor do not share mutations in the same genes.
OVOMATCH: AN APP FOR FINDING YOUR IDEAL DONOR
The question of whether the baby will resemble the mother-to-be is one of the most worrying questions, which is why Ovobank’s R+D+ i team was in charge of developing the Ovomatch mobile app, which allows patients to find the donor who physically resembles them the most. Through this totally free mobile app, the patient will be able to see the total number of phenotypically compatible donors. This is possible thanks to the app’s mathematical facial recognition algorithm.
Once the patient downloads the app on her mobile device or tablet, she only has to register and take a selfie. A few seconds later, she will be presented with a list of donors who most closely resemble her. As the current law stipulates, the patient will not be able to select her egg donor or know her identity. For this, the Ovobank team comes into play again, which will carry out the matching from the selection with the available donors in the app and will analyse, among many other aspects, the blood group and the features of both, in order to be able to assign the patient the most similar donor to her.
We know that ovodonation generates many doubts, so we invite you to have a first informative visit totally free of charge with our specialists.
For further information, please contact: https://ovoclinic.net/contact/
