Contribution of immunology to build precision medicine in reproduction: present and future

Abstract

Infertility affects millions of people of reproductive age. The failure of a blastocyst to implant is a leading cause of psychological distress. It became increasingly evident that an effective immune dialogue occurs at each step in the fluids surrounding the oocyte, the spermatozoa, the embryo, or the endometrium. Exploring and deciphering this dialogue could potentially help understand why 50% of healthy euploid blastocysts fail to implant. Introducing immunology into reproductive medicine requires a change of mindset to bring immune hypothesis to clinical applications. Implantation of an embryo requires a prepared uterus in order to dialogue with the embryo, which is able to express and repair itself. Exploring the uterine immune profile of patients with previous implantation failures (IF) or recurrent miscarriages (RM) has already been developed and is under evaluation as a precision tool to equilibrate the uterine environment before implantation to increase the subsequent live birth rate after the embryo transfer. Immunology may also be fundamental in the future to identify through non-invasive procedure the competence of oocytes or embryos through reliable immune biomarkers quantified in follicular fluids or embryo supernatants during the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process. Non-invasive biomarkers would allow physicians to identify competent oocytes or embryos based on their ability to communicate with the mother and their energetic potential for all the self-repair processes that should occur during the preimplantation and the implantation period. This area of research is only beginning.