Dr Marcos Horton graduated in Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He first trained as an ObGyn at the British Hospital in Buenos Aires and later as a postgraduate fellow in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the Huntington Reproductive Center and Huntington Memorial Hospital, Pasadena, California.

From 1998 to 2007, Dr Marcos Horton worked as Medical Staff at the Fertilab Reproductive Medicine, Buenos Aires and is now, since 2007, Medical Director at Pregna Medicina Reproductiva, Buenos Aires.

Dr Marcos Horton has a solid experience in Clinical Infertility, Assisted Reproduction, Ultrasound and Reproductive Surgery.

Dr Marcos Horton is currently President of the Scientific Committee of the Sociedad Argentina de Medicina Reproductiva (SAMeR) and is on the Board of Directors of the International Federation of Fertility Societies (IFFS) since 2010. 

Project: Fourier-Transform Infrared spectroscopy in metabolomics and its application to embryo assessment in IVF

Our Project is a Joint Investigation between Pregna Medicina Reproductiva and the research team from the CINDEFI, Universidad Nacional de La Plata led by Prof. Osvaldo Yantorno. The CINDEFI will be in charge of the metabolomic profiling section of the project.

One of the challenges in Modern Reproductive Medicine is to improve pregnancy rates and decrease multiples in view of the risk these pregnancies pose to the mother and the foetuses, and the high cost to the Health System of neonatal intensive care for premature multiples. Embryo selection is crucial to choose the most appropriate embryo to transfer. Nevertheless, current criteria for embryo selection rely on crude morphology which is prone to errors. New methods for embryo selection are being considered, but some of them are invasive (e.g. PGD) and have not been successful to date. 

Non-invasive embryo assessment is currently being evaluated with new approaches like metabolomic profiling and proteomics. Some preliminary results have been promising in the identification of embryos with high implantation potential, but due to different reasons, they have not been validated to date. Metabolomic profiling is the quantitative or qualitative assessment of the metabolome (molecules, metabolic byproducts, metabolites, hormones, ATP, signal molecules of a biologic system), and its evaluation in the embryo culture supernatants could help to determine the best embryo to transfer, thus improving pregnancy rates and reducing multiple pregnancies in IVF. We propose to assess embryo metabolomics by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and, in combination with multivariate statistical analysis develop a robust, fast, and non-invasive model that can predict pregnancy outcome before embryo transfer. 

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