Here’s your IVF research roundup for February 2026. Each month, I highlight everything I’ve shared on Remembryo — including new IVF study summaries, popular social posts, answers to community questions, and a full list of research highlights with links and short summaries from my newsletter. The paywall is off for this post.
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🔗 Original studies are referenced in this post or within the linked Remembryo posts.
💡 Reminder: Terms underlined with a dotted black line are linked to glossary entries. Clicking these does not count toward your paywall limit.
Remembryo posts
Here’s what I covered this month on Remembryo. Click any image to read more.
A 2026 study found that a microfluidic device called FIND-Chip can recover additional eggs from follicular fluid that may have been missed by manual searching after an egg retrieval, with one live birth reported. Read more.
A 2026 randomized trial found that natural FETs had similar healthy live birth rates to medicated FETs, but were linked to lower risks of preeclampsia, pregnancy loss, and some other pregnancy complications. Read more.
Researchers in a 2026 meta-analysis combined 15 randomized trials in women with POR or DOR and found that while some forms of acupuncture were linked to slightly more eggs retrieved, they didn’t improve pregnancy rates. Read more.
A 2026 study used a machine learning model to predict whether a miscarriage was euploid or aneuploid using routine medical data, without PGT-A, and showed moderate ability to distinguish between the two while identifying several associated factors. Read more.
A 2026 study found that mosaic embryo outcomes vary by type and level, with high-level and trisomy mosaics showing lower success rates, while segmental mosaics had outcomes similar to euploids. Read more.
A 2026 meta-analysis found no benefit of ERA or other endometrial receptivity tests in general IVF patients, with a possible improvement in live birth for RIF patients transferring untested embryos. Read more.
Top viewed posts on social
Here you can see the top 3 most popular posts for the month on Instagram, excluding the posts from above.
- Does blood type affect infertility risk? A study comparing 696 infertile couples with a regional population found that blood type O was more common among infertile men and women, while blood type AB was less common, and couples where both partners had type O appeared more frequently than expected. The findings suggest possible biological links between blood type and reproductive factors such as sperm morphology or immune interactions, but the study had important limitations and does not show that blood type determines infertility. Read more on Instagram or the original publication in JARG.
- AI tools struggle to predict IVF results in a real-world test. Researchers tested whether the AI chatbots ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Gemini could predict IVF outcomes using basic clinical case summaries from 1,473 IVF/ICSI cycles. Although each model performed slightly better on different tasks, overall accuracy was limited, leading the authors to conclude that general-purpose AI tools are not reliable enough to guide IVF decisions. Read more on Instagram or the original publication in JARG.
- Meta-analysis compares IVF success rates for day 5 vs day 3 embryos. In a randomized trial of 450 younger couples with severe male factor infertility, adding PGT-A to ICSI did not improve live birth rates after the first transfer or cumulatively over 12 months compared with no PGT-A. However, PGT-A was associated with a lower miscarriage rate after the first transfer, suggesting reduced pregnancy loss without an overall live birth benefit in this population. Read more on Instagram or the original publication in The Cochrane Library.
And here’s the top 3 older Remembryo posts (based on Instagram story views). Click any image to read more.
A 2025 study suggests that acetaminophen (Tylenol), at levels reached after a standard dose, can disrupt embryo development in experimental models, raising questions about its potential impact on IVF outcomes, although better research in humans is needed before changing clinical practice. Read more.
A new case report describes the healthy birth of dizygotic twin girls from embryos labeled as aneuploid by PGT-A, highlighting the limitations of embryo testing and the need to reconsider strict discard protocols. Read more.
A large 2025 study charts how AMH levels decline with age in over 22,000 women, revealing when diminished ovarian reserve (DOR) becomes more common, regardless of infertility status. Read more.
IVF in the news highlights
Each week in the Remembryo newsletter, I share IVF-related stories that made headlines in the news. Below are 3 leading headlines for the month:
- How one IVF patient used ChatGPT for support (CNET)
- TrumpRx Adds IVF Medications (The Guardian)
- Pregnant patients who stopped SSRIs had more emergency visits (The New York Times)
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IVF questions from the community
Here are select questions that I answered either in my Facebook group or on Reddit.
- Does the EMMA/ALICE test work? The current research on EMMA and ALICE is mixed and still limited. One study suggested that treating abnormal results with antibiotics or probiotics could bring pregnancy rates closer to those seen in patients with normal results, but there were few proper control groups in this study, so it’s hard to know how much benefit the testing itself provides. Overall, there isn’t strong evidence yet showing that these tests clearly improve outcomes for RIF or RPL patients. Read more in my post Study investigates the use of EMMA & ALICE in IVF patients with RIF, RPL.
- Is ICSI useful for couples without male factor infertility? Researchers in a 2022 study combined the results of 26 studies that compared ICSI vs IVF in couples without male-factor infertility and found minor differences in the risk of total fertilization failure, live birth rates in women >35 and implantation rates. Read more in my post 2022 meta-analysis compares ICSI vs IVF in couples without male-factor.
- Does a PGT-A biopsy harm the embryo? At the blastocyst stage, about 5 to 10 cells are removed during biopsy from an embryo that typically contains hundreds of cells, and studies have generally found similar implantation rates between biopsied and unbiopsied embryos, suggesting minimal harm. However, smaller or earlier-stage blastocysts, as well as some day 7, poor-quality, or repeatedly biopsied embryos, might be more vulnerable, but there generally isn’t much data here so more studies are needed. Read more in my post Does a PGT-A biopsy damage the embryo?
IVF research brief
🔒 The full research brief for the month begins below (paid subscribers only)
Each week I flag ~10-20 IVF studies I find most helpful. Some are covered in detail on Remembryo, but paying subscribers get short summaries and links to all of them, organized into categories like implantation, egg quality, PGT-A, etc.
Below is the full list of about 50 short summaries and links for studies that weren’t featured on Remembryo this month (available to paying members only).
🔍 Sneak peek: 3 select summaries from the month
- DNA contamination occurred in 0.45% of embryo biopsies, with some labs showing much higher or lower rates, potentially leading to diagnostic errors. Read more (abstract only)
- In a retrospective study, persistent endometrial fluid during single euploid FET was linked to lower live birth rates, but cancelling cycles due to fluid did not improve outcomes. Read more (abstract only)
- In this meta analysis, natural cycle FETs showed similar or slightly higher live birth rates than medicated FETs, though evidence quality was often low. Read more (abstract only)
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About Embryoman
Embryoman (Sean Lauber) is a former embryologist and the founder of Remembryo, an IVF research and fertility education website. After working in an IVF lab in the US, he returned to Canada and now focuses on making fertility research more accessible. He holds a Master’s in Immunology and launched Remembryo in 2018 to help patients and professionals make sense of IVF research. Sean shares weekly study updates on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit regularly. He also answers questions on Reddit or in his private Facebook group.