Nobody has published what happened to the children
Not one published study reports what happened to a baby chosen by polygenic embryo screening. Three professional bodies say so independently.
The previous stage covered the tests most women are offered now. This stage is about the layer being sold on top of them.
At the top of that layer sits polygenic embryo screening. If you are doing IVF, a company will score each embryo for its predicted chance of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, schizophrenia and other common conditions, and rank them for you. Some companies also sequence the whole genome of each embryo.
Start with the single most important fact about both of these, because nobody selling them says it out loud.
For polygenic embryo screening there are no outcome numbers. None. No published study reports a disease outcome in any child born after polygenic embryo screening. Not a cohort. Not a trial. Not a follow-up. This is not a claim built from one search. It is what three separate professional bodies state.
The European Society of Human Genetics, in 2022: No clinical research protocol has been performed so far to assess the diagnostic effectiveness of PRSs in embryos. Were these be established, it would take many years to obtain reliable results, given that one might have to wait decades for people to develop, for example, early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, in its opinion released in December 2025: Currently, evidence supporting the clinical utility, long-term safety, and predictive validity of PGT-P is lacking.
The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics released a statement in February 2024. The full text sits behind a paywall and could not be read for this guide, so only the College's own announcement of it is quoted here. In that announcement the lead author says: While promotion of PGT-P has led to increased demand, this methodology remains unproven.
A fourth body, the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, wrote in 2021 about accuracy rather than about outcome data: there are currently no clinical uses in psychiatry.
The same advisory adds a disclosure you are entitled to have: The few published polygenic embryo screening studies have been mostly led by a private company selling these services.
Whole genome sequencing of embryos is a different case, and the honest statement about it is weaker. No published outcome study, and no professional society endorsement, was identified in the searches carried out for this guide. That is a search finding, not a proof that none exists, and it should be read as one.
So what evidence does exist? Laboratory validation. One company's published validation of its own embryo sequencing test used cell lines and research embryos with already known variants, to see whether the machine could find them. It reported that amplification worked in 98.2% of embryos and that sensitivity was 98.0%. That is a real technical result. There was no pregnancy in it, no birth, no child, and no comparison group.
The physical problem underneath is worth knowing. A biopsy takes about five to ten cells from the part of the embryo that will become the placenta. Copying that tiny amount of DNA enough times to read it introduces, in the words of the key technical paper, thousands of false-positive errors introduced by the extensive DNA amplification required for deep sequencing.
The study that showed the problem could be managed did it on two embryos, and it needed the genomes of both parents and both grandparents on the father's side to sort signal from noise.
"If there is no such study, why is the word proven on your website?"
"What exactly has been validated: the laboratory method, or the prediction?"