How to find the right donor?

I can give you an answer through our own experience at Cryos International, we have a website that has a good selection of egg donors both anonymous and non-anonymous donors. We have donors that have decided to have just a basic profile – that means that the information we provide on the website is mostly about their phenotype, their characteristics, blood group, so you need to match the blood group as well, C&B status and so on. We have also extended profile and extended profile for both anonymous and non-anonymous gives a lot more information about the donor, for example, we do emotional intelligence tests on them, there is a very thorough family tree and family history with regards to their health, there is a very extensive information about what donors like and don’t like, so you get to feel more what the donor is like. There is also a childhood photo, if there are anonymous donors but also adult photos for the non-anonymous donors. Depending what kind of donor you would like to have, what the status is allowed in your country or the treatment country that will be receiving the eggs, you can make a choice on how much to know about the donor, so you can decide whether you want to know more or less. We suggest that when you are selecting donors because there is a lot of donors on the website, to shortlist at least three to four donors for yourself because by the time you make the selection (which is what takes the longest to do) sometimes, the donors may not be any longer available on the website so, then you would have to go back and restart the whole process again. So the best thing to do is shortlist three to four donors that appeal to you characteristically and of course, background, their education and so on and then contact the customer care who can help you through your selection.

We have very strict criteria: age below 31- 32, should have at least one healthy baby, have high AMH level (more than 3) meaning that donors should produce 15 – 20 eggs. Also donors should not have bad habits and a nice physical appearance. We are checking infections, genetics, and doing all the tests. We check the general health, also psychologists talk with this girl because sometimes we suspect that girl does not understand totally what she is doing or somebody pressured her so, we should be sure that this is her own choice, she’s not under the pressure, she understand what she’s doing with this egg donation program, understand risks etc.

One of the questions is how do I make sure that the egg donor is genetically a good donor for us to use. The genetic predisposition or assessing her genetics comes in different levels. The first one is going over her profile and making sure there are no diseases in the family that have a genetic component. For example cancers in the family or psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, sometimes we see a lot of addictions such as alcoholism. It can be in one of her parents and we already know that those have a genetic component. This is the first layer and the second, she goes through genetic counseling a lot of the time. It is interesting because in genetic counseling you may say, what’s the difference? She is telling us the same and saying the same to the counselor, however the counselor has ways of digging into the family history much deeper than we do and detect things that we may not see as an issue and realise “oh you know the disease your aunt had has a strong genetic component”. Genetic counseling is highly recommended for any egg donor. It is not uncommon that we discover things that none of us saw on her profile.
That is the second test we do and the third test we do is genetic testing. With genetic testing there are now panels that test from 200 to 500 genetic diseases to make sure that she herself is not a carrier of a genetic disease that could be a problem but most importantly that her and the sperm donor (partner, husband or sperm donor) does not share the same genetic mutation. Everyone gets alarmed as when we complete genetic testing almost all of us come back positive for something but the key is to make sure that whatever she has is positive and whoever provides the sperm is not positive as well, so this is the third layer. The fourth layer is testing the embryo’s. I know that this is controversial and that not all clinics do this. I am a big believer in genetic testing of the embryo’s or what we call PGT, but that is making sure that the embryo doesn’t carry any chromosome abnormalities. So as you can see there are 4 different layers so that we do the best we can to make sure that this will be a healthy pregnancy: the profile, genetic counseling, genetic testing and testing the embryo and not to mention of course that during the pregnancy there will be additional testing.

Many countries have different legislation on donor selection. Usually, donors are not anonymous or anonymous. The decision can be made by the patient/the couple or by the medical team of the clinic. In Spain, for example, by law, the decision is made by the medical team and donors are anonymous.

The medical team decides on the donor for the patient based on the phenotypic similarities. Also, the clinic can improve the selection by adding different filters, e.g. genetic compatibility or facial resemblance. At Fenomatch, we have developed a tool specifically for the intended mother based on facial resemblance that measures more than 12,000 facial biometric points. This way we help doctors and embryologists to  make this decision for the patient and choose the right donor for them.