One of the toughest parts of the popular fertility treatment may soon be a thing of the past.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of women across the country undergo IVF, a physically and emotionally draining process that involves retrieving multiple eggs from the ovaries and fertilizing them with sperm in a lab.
In the weeks leading up to egg retrieval, patients must inject themselves with hormones at precise times each day — a routine often described as one of the most stressful and painful parts of IVF.
Now, scientists at McGill University may have found a way to ease that burden.
They’ve developed a light-activated microneedle patch that can deliver hormones automatically at the right time, making the process less painful — and potentially increasing the chances of a successful pregnancy.
“IVF success rates are at best 30%, even for the youngest women,” Vivienne Tam, a PhD student at McGill who was the lead author of the study, said in a press release.
“The hope is that if you take out the human error with injecting yourself and deliver the drug at times optimized for each patient, you could potentially see this success rate go up.”
The delivery system relies on a hydrogel microneedle patch packed with specially engineered nanoparticles that store and release a key IVF hormone, leuprolide, when activated by near-infrared light.
To build it, the team first determined how many hormone-loaded nanoparticles each microneedle could hold without compromising its ability to penetrate the skin.
Next, they tested whether the light could reliably release the hormone in a porcine skin model over two hours.
Finally, they demonstrated that even a short five-minute pulse of light could deliver measurable levels of leuprolide into the skin, bloodstream, and organs of a live rat.
“The light can also be programmed to release the drug at the specific time the drug is needed, which could differ for each individual,” Tam said.
While the concept of light-triggered drug delivery isn’t new, earlier attempts ran into a key obstacle: they often released foreign substances into the body, raising serious safety and regulatory concerns.
But McGill’s new patch avoids that problem entirely.
“This is the first time that we were able to show light-triggered drug release from a nanoparticle-microneedle composite without releasing any foreign substance into the body,” said Marta Cerruti, a materials engineering professor and senior author of the study.
The researchers said this breakthrough could make the technology a more realistic treatment option, potentially paving the way for faster clinical adoption than previous designs.
The development comes as demand for IVF continues to rise, driven by advances in medical technology, increased awareness and wider employer coverage.
At the same time, couples waiting longer to have children, along with declining fertility rates, have made IVF an increasingly common route to parenthood.
In the US, 42% of adults said in 2023 that they or someone they know has used fertility treatments like IVF — up from 33% just five years earlier, according to the Pew Research Center.
Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that over 2.5 million IVF cycles are performed each year, resulting in over half a million deliveries annually.
“The promise of painless delivery could drastically change the experience of patients who require repeated administration of drugs via needles,” the study authors wrote.
But that’s not just for women going through IVF.
The researchers said the innovative drug delivery system could one day help anyone who relies on daily injections, including those with diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
Looking ahead, they plan to refine the system’s dosing, explore hormone release profiles and investigate commercial possibilities.
