PGD Conference Commemorates 100 Babies Born Through Remarkable Procedure
An academic conference held at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center commemorated the birth of the 100th baby at the hospital through the Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis(PGD) procedure since the project was launched in 2005. Shaare Zedek has been increasingly recognized as a local and global leader in the procedure having recorded remarkable successes with the highly complex procedure. PGD enables embryos achieved through IVF to be carefully and expertly analyzed before implantation into the uterus thus enabling genetic disorders to be indentified before implantation. This allows parents known to be carriers of specific genetic diseases to bring children into the world free of that disease.
The PGD program at Shaare Zedek is funded by Rabbi David and Anita Fuld who have been personally responsible for bringing the project to Shaare Zedek and ensuring its continued success. The hospital’s Director General, Professor Jonathan Halevy said that PGD therefore represented a very unique project for the hospital “with the distinction of being personally developed through the initiative and hard work of a donor.” He acknowledged that were it not for the Fulds it would not be certain that PGD would be among the services the hospitals offers but said that today it is “one of the most precious and successful programs at Shaare Zedek.”
Rabbi Fuld opened the conference by thanking the hospital for giving him the chance to initiate this project saying, “I don’t think any institution can approach the caliber of that at Shaare Zedek and we are truly grateful to be affiliated with Shaare Zedek.”
The day-long conference featured presentations from leading researchers and physicians from Israel and abroad including presenters from as far away as Australia who lectured on recent developments in PGD and the increasing role the procedure is playing in the field of reproductive medicine. PGD has been recognized as one of the most innovative forms of medical technology in use today. It can literally make the dream of a disease-free baby come true for parents who in decades prior would have been forced to go childless.
Rabbi and Mrs. Fuld have been very active players in the program and Rabbi Fuld who in addition to his philanthropic work is a very experienced mohel performed the brit milah on the first “PGD baby.” As of several days prior to the conference, Shaare Zedek had been responsible for no fewer than 106 disease-free children born as a result of PGD. The program is a collaboration of Shaare Zedek’s Department of Medical Genetics and the IVF Unit.