Vitrification: a simple and successful method for cryostorage of human blastocysts

Cryopreservation is one of the keystones in clinical infertility treatment. Especially vitrification has become a well-established and widely used routine procedure that allows important expansion of therapeutic strategies when in vitro fertilization (IVF) is used to treat infertility. Vitrification of human blastocysts allows us to maximize the potential for conception from any one in vitro fertilization cycle and prevents wastage of embryos. This goes even further toward to best utilize a patient's supernumerary oocytes after retrieval, maximizing the use of embryos from a single stimulation cycle. The technology may even be used to eliminate fresh embryo transfers for reasons of convenience, uterine receptivity, fertility preservation, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or emergency management. In this chapter, the application of vitrification technology for cryopreserving human blastocyst will be revealed through step-by-step protocols. The results that are presented using the described protocols underscore the robustness of the vitrification technology for embryo cryopreservation.