The biobank is named ReproUnion Biobank and Infertility Cohort (RUBIC) and is the largest of its kind to date. RUBIC is part of ReproUnion 2.0, a Swedish-Danish collaboration project in the field of reproductive medicine.
It is already well known that advanced age is a risk factor for involuntary infertility. The chance of becoming pregnant decreases sharply even before the age of 30. The researchers want to investigate other factors that may play a role. Among other things, they will identify the causes of infertility, develop new therapies and investigate the long-term consequences of infertility.
By building the biobank on both sides of the Öresund sound, the researchers hope to gather over 5,000 involuntarily childless couples and thus also get an answer to the question of what causes infertility. In the long term, they hope to help more people have children after treatment.
In Sweden, the average age of first-time mothers is increasing and is currently 29.86 years. A woman under the age of 30 has about a 20 per cent chance per month of becoming pregnant, while for an average 40-year-old woman, the probability of a pregnancy is only five per cent. Male infertility is also a problem. At the international level, the number of sperm in the average man has decreased by fifty per cent in the last 40 years, and sperm quality is also worse.
The Swedish studies are being carried out at the Reproductive Medicine Centre in Malmö and involve researchers from Lund University and Skåne University Hospital in Malmö.