Prof. Osvaldo Yantorno
Prof. Osvaldo Yantorno received his PhD in Biochemistry from the Faculty of Sciences at the National University of La Plata, Argentina, in 1978.
Since 1989, he is Professor of Biotechnology at the National University of La Plata. Prof. Osvaldo Yantorno is also, since 2000, Head of the Biospectroscopy Laboratory at CINDEFI, Faculty of Sciences in this university.
Osvaldo Yantorno is also a board member of CINDEFI and the Binational Director of the Argentinean-Brasilean Center of Biotechnology (CABBIO) belonging to the National Ministry of Science and Technology (MINCyT) in Argentina, and founding member and vice-president of the Argentina Society for General Microbiology.
His research interests include characterization of biomaterials by Fourier Transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and the application of multivariate pattern-recognition and artificial neural net analysis.
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, Buenos Aires led by Dr Marcos Horton and the research team from CINDEFI, Universidad Nacional de La Plata. 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.
