Charlotte Baby Born From 22-Year-Old Frozen Sperm: Hope, Love and Technology

By Karen Garloch, Charlotte Observer

Apr. 09, 2009—In the early 1980s, when Chris Biblis was 13, doctors diagnosed leukemia and treated him with chemotherapy for three years.
Then, at 16, doctors recommended two more years of treatment, including radiation that could make him sterile.
Fearful that he couldn't have children someday, his parents persuaded doctors in Georgia to freeze a sample of their teenage son's sperm.
Twenty-two years later, Biblis, now 39, and his wife, Melodie, 33, are celebrating the birth of their first child – the product of his long-ago frozen sperm that fertilized her egg.
Their egg and sperm were joined last June during two high-tech infertility procedures – in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) – performed by a doctor at Reproductive Endocrinology Associates of Charlotte.
Their daughter, Stella, born at Presbyterian Hospital Feb. 25, weighed 7 pounds, 7 ounces and is “fattening up nicely,” said Melodie Biblis, who works at Presbyterian herself as a nurse practitioner in pediatrics.
The doctors group claims the Charlotte couple holds the world's record – or at least a tie – for having used the longest-frozen sperm to produce a baby.
The Observer could not independently confirm that claim. Recent reports in a medical newsletter and on NBC's “Today Show” said a baby born in New York in September held the record. The father's sperm had been frozen 21 years earlier.
Chris Biblis' sperm was frozen April 25, 1986, at Xytex International, a sperm bank in Atlanta, and was thawed on June 12, 2008.
“We believe this is a world record,” said Bonnie Schwab of Vanguard Communications in Colorado, which represents the Charlotte doctors.
Life-creating technology
Even the thought of freezing sperm was unusual in the 1980s, said Dr. Richard Wing, the Biblis' doctor and founder of the Charlotte fertility clinic at Kings Drive and Morehead Street.
The first IVF baby was born in England in 1978, and the first ICSI baby was reported in 1982. Before that, men may have hoped to use frozen sperm for artificial insemination – what Wing referred to as the “turkey baster” method – but he said it's almost impossible to store enough sperm to achieve a pregnancy that way.
The newer ICSI-IVF combination procedure requires a much smaller amount of sperm. Wing said his clinic performs about 600 IVF procedures a year, and about 65 percent of those also involve ICSI.
Of 15 eggs retrieved from Melodie Biblis' ovaries, 10 were usable, Wing said. Using only some of Chris Biblis' frozen sperm, doctors then injected one healthy-appearing sperm into each egg. Of those 10 attempts, seven resulted in embryos, and two were transferred into Melodie Biblis' uterus. “One didn't implant, and we don't know why,” Wing said.
The other five were frozen for future use...read more...

 SOURCE: Charlotte Observer