San Francisco, April 28: Overture Life, a Spanish startup, which developed a sperm-injecting robot that can be controlled using a PlayStation controller, has successfully fertilised human eggs, giving birth to two healthy babies. However, they were able to utilise a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to help with the development process.

A student engineer from a startup successfully steered a small, mechanised needle during in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures, using a specialized controller. Through this technique, individual sperm cells were carefully deposited into human eggs over a dozen times. According to the researchers, the procedures resulted in healthy embryos, which led to the birth of two baby girls. The researchers claim that these babies are the first known individuals to be born after fertilisation with the aid of automated technology, the report said. Baby Born With Two Penis: Pakistani Boy Born With Two Working Penises and No Anus in Rare Medical Condition Diphallia.

"I was calm. In that exact moment, I thought, 'It's just one more experiment'," Eduard Alba, the student mechanical engineer who commanded the sperm-injecting device, was quoted as saying. Moreover, the startup said that its device is an initial step towards automating in vitro fertilisation, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure far less expensive and far more common than it is today.

At present, in vitro fertilization (IVF) laboratories are typically operated by highly skilled embryologists, who can earn over $125,000 annually, and are responsible for carefully manipulating sperm and eggs with the aid of ultra-thin hollow needles and powerful microscopes. Further, the report mentioned that Overture has received the most funding thus far: approximately $37 million from investors such as Khosla Ventures and Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube. Baby Girl Born With Extremely Rare 2-Inch-Long 'True Tail' Covered in Hair and Skin in Northeastern Mexico (View Tweet).

According to the experts, this is just the first step towards fully automating the process. "The concept is extraordinary, but this is a baby step," Gianpiero Palermo, who developed the now-commonplace intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedure in the 1990s, was quoted as saying. He added that Overture's engineers still had to manually load sperm cells onto the injector needles, which means "this is not yet robotic ICSI".

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 28, 2023 08:18 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).