Are There Egg Banks For Infertility Patients?

Not frequently asked, but still it's a question that may become more commonly heard in fertility clinics:

Are there egg banks, similar to sperm banks, that we can use to select donors for our IVF?

Sonja Kristiansen, Medical Director of Houston Fertility Center responds:


Sperm banks have been around for decades now. The existence of these third-party reproductive agencies has made accessing male gametes very convenient for fertility patients. So far, the idea of egg banks is still too new for the same circumstance to be the case. That's because the development of egg freezing technology has been more challenging than sperm cryopreservation.

But egg cryo has come a very long way in the last few years. In fact, I recently blogged about a study that showed pregnancy results were nearly the same regardless of whether fertility patients used fresh or frozen donor eggs. Besides being good news for patients, another possible outcome from this study's conclusions is the growth of egg banking.

What's so good about egg banking? The availability of frozen eggs will likely result in less expensive IVF procedures for many patients.

For now, the primary way to go about it, if you need to use a donor's eggs to conceive, is to use your fertility specialist's connections either directly to egg donors or to agencies that specialize in egg donor screening and selection. It seems a little more cumbersome than using an egg bank, but it's the standard until more growth in those services is seen.

~ Sonja Kristiansen, MD