A new approach to fertility treatment that could allow women to have a cheaper form of IVF in their lunch hour is being developed by a company that hopes to introduce it in Britain this year.

The Invocell device is designed to enable IVF to be performed without complex laboratory equipment and could make the procedure faster, more convenient and less expensive.

In standard IVF, eggs are fertilised with sperm outside the body, and any resulting embryos are then left to develop in culture for three to five days before the best ones are transferred to the womb.

The Invocell device is a sealed capsule that allows fertilisation to take place inside the body, in the vaginal cavity. A woman would first be given mild drugs to stimulate her ovaries, and then eggs would be removed from them while she is under sedation. Up to seven eggs are then put into the Invocell capsule, along with washed sperm. The capsule is then placed inside the vagina. After three days the patient would return for a second appointment, in which the capsule is removed and any fertilised embryos are examined for quality. The best one or two would then be transferred to the womb.

The first appointment would take about 90 minutes and the second half an hour, according to Claude Ranoux, of BioXcell, the Massachusetts-based company that developed the device.

Because eggs, sperm and embryos would at no point be stored outside the body, the technique means that IVF could be performed in a doctor’s office, without incurring the costs involved in incubation.

Dr Ranoux said this would cut the cost of fertility treatment by hundreds of pounds. The typical bill in Britain is about £2,500 per cycle.

“You don’t need a complex IVF centre, a laboratory, lots of the equipment,” he said. “You can perform this procedure in an office.”

BioXcell has completed about 800 trial cycles, obtaining a clinical pregnancy rate of 19.7 per cent. Its data were presented last week to the International Society for Mild Approaches in Assisted Reproduction conference in London. The average success rate for conventional treatments for women aged under 35 in Britain is 29.6 per cent.

BioXcell has applied for approval for the device from the US Food and Drug Administration, and it has also received a European Union CE mark. Dr Ranoux said the company hopes to market it in Europe, including Britain, later this year.

British fertility doctors, however, questioned whether it would be popular. Simon Fishel, of Care Fertility in Nottingham, said a major drawback would be that embryos could not be observed immediately after fertilisation, to make sure that it has taken place normally.

It would also be unsuitable for the 50 per cent of IVF patients who use intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI, a technique to treat male infertility.

Regulatory issues would also make it hard to perform in an office setting, Dr Fishel said. “You would still need the accredited facilities for egg collection, and there’s also the question of what you’d do with any spare embryos. If you wanted to freeze them, you’d still need an incubator and a freezer.”

John Paul Maytum, of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said: “If a clinic wanted to use this device, we would have to look very carefully at whether it would fall within our remit.”

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