Pacific Fertility Clinic's liquid nitrogen failure may put hundreds of patients' frozen eggs at risk

A liquid nitrogen failure at one of San Francisco's leading fertility clinics may have damaged hundreds of patients' chances to one day conceive.

Over the weekend, the Pacific Fertility Clinic contacted roughly 400 patients who had stored eggs and embryos at its Bay Area facility, according to The Washington Post. The malfunction was reportedly discovered March 4 by a lab director, who transferred the threatened tissue to an alternative storage tank with the appropriate levels of nitrogen.

It took about a week for the clinic to sort through and verify which patients had eggs and embryos in the affected tank.

The extent of the damage remains unclear, as well as how many patients were affected by the malfunction. The faulty tank stored "several thousand" eggs and embryos and accounts for about 15 percent of the tissue Pacific stores, according to the Post.

The Pacific Fertility Clinic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Pacific Fertility Clinic President Carl Herbert told the Post that when the staff thawed a sample of eggs affected by the malfunction, they found that the tissue remained viable. Herbert said no embryos have yet been tested.

Any damage would come with a high financial, emotional and potentially legal toll.

In recent years, egg freezing has been an increasingly popular way for women to hit the pause button on having a child, but not give up their hopes for motherhood altogether.

"There's been an explosion," Dr. Mitchell Rosen, director of the fertility preservation center at the University of California, San Francisco previously told the San Francisco Business Times. "There's been a significant advancement in the past five years from a technological standpoint and the success rates are adequate to expand its use to reproductive potential."

The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology has reported a massive jump in the number of egg-freezing patients, from 475 in 2009 to more than 7,500 patients in 2015. About 20,000 women in total across the country have saved their eggs in some capacity.

A class-action lawsuit was filed yesterday in Cleveland, Ohio after fertility clinic there suffered from a similar nitrogen failure. Roughly 2,000 eggs and embryos were at risk after the temperature at the University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center fertility clinic began to fluctuate earlier this month.

No lawsuits have yet been filed in response to the malfunction at the Pacific Fertility Clinic.

"This is a very charged philosophical conversation," Bobby DiCello, a partner with DiCello Levitt & Casey representing the patients in Cleveland said. "The law regards embryos and eggs as property, and since these are such important pieces of property, they're treasures. This is like bringing a piece of treasure to a bank and having it light up in flames. The [clinic's] duty to protect them is well known and understood in the law."

At the Pacific Fertility Clinic, egg freezing costs start at $8,345 for the first cycle. Clinical monitoring, egg retrieval and egg cryopreservation costs an additional $6,995. Neither of those include the new patient consultation, precycle lab work, egg freezing medications — which can cost between $2,000 to $6,000 — or the ongoing tissue storage fees, which the clinic charges $600 per year.

Dr. Eldon Schriock, a fertility expert at Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco, previously told the San Francisco Business Times that the relationship between a fertility doctor and their patient is deeply personal, and requires more psychiatry and counseling.

"This is very personal," he said. "There's a lot of trust that has to happen. I like to make decisions with my patients, not for them."