After 33 years of IVF, the rewards of treatment are still largely confined to industrialised countries and those who can afford it. Now, the IVF Lite Foundation has set about the immeasurable task of making fertility treatment more accessible to developing countries through a programme of pilot projects, professional awareness and involvement of government and non-governmental agencies.One of the most important aims of the IVF Lite Foundation is to battle the silence that exists on the issue of infertility in most developing countries, even among the media and governments. Education in reproductive health is the message we have to take to the politicians, and we have to help them on this.


IVF Lite is not easy to perform well and many centers which try it give up easily. There is no margin for error. There are several reasons for the success we have with the much lower cost IVF Lite technique. Firstly, it is hard to overstate how crucial the purity of air quality in the lab as well as the operating room is. There are organic volatile toxins in the air everywhere in microscopic quantities that don't seem to affect our well being. But they do dramatically affect the well being of these highly exposed embryos. Secondly, the very clever Japanese approach to minimal stimulation allows us to retrieve smaller numbers of better quality eggs than the more expensive massive dosing of conventional IVF protocols, better quality eggs at lower cost. Finally, the ability to freeze the embryos with impunity and then transfer in a later cycle where the uterine lining is more perfectly synchronized to the stage of embryo development than during a stimulated cycle, all add up to high success rates at lower cost.


Dr. Sherman Silber (USA), one of the process’s pioneers, explains the concept this way: "Think of this simple parable: If you are sitting under an apple tree, and wish to eat the most ripe and ready apples,you have a choice. You can chop down the entire tree and look at every apple on the fallen tree to see which ones are ready, or you can simply try to shake the lower branches and eat the one or two that were ready to fall. That is the idea of mini-IVF or IVF Lite".