According to his mother, seven-week-old Connor Levy is “the happiest kid in the world.” But if it weren’t for a new form of genetic testing, Connor might not be here.

Born on May 18 in Philadelphia, he is the first baby born via next generation sequencing, a screening technique that increases the chances of success of in vitro fertilization.

Lead researcher Dagan Wells presented a paper on the new technique Monday at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology’s yearly meeting.

Wells, a researcher at the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at the University of Oxford, created the technique, which is used on women undergoing IVF. It helps detect abnormalities in an embryo before it’s transferred to the uterus, and Wells says it could cut the number of miscarriages women have after IVF in half.

His method allows doctors to figure out which embryo has the best chance of making a baby.

“Over 80 per cent of all the embryos transferred to the uterus do not make a baby. There’s a great inefficiency in the system. That’s something we have been trying to address,” Wells said.

“Probably the single biggest reason is that fairly often we find that (the embryos) are chromosomally abnormal.”

Connor’s parents, Marybeth Scheidts, 36, and her 41-year-old husband, David Levy, had tried for five years to have a baby before she became pregnant. Artificial insemination failed three times.

Other genetic tests were an option, but they would have cost $6,000 — which the couple couldn’t afford. Michael Glassner, the couple’s fertility doctor in Philadelphia, asked if they wanted join a clinical trial to have access to the next generation sequencing for free, and the couple accepted.

Wells says his method will eventually be two-thirds the cost of most types of genetic testing. Genetic testing isn’t new, so that’s primarily what makes his genome sequencing technique different from others.

Glassner says most people, like Scheidts and Levy, can’t afford $6,000 for genetic testing.

“What this is going to be able to do is allow patients at a lower cost to drastically improve their prognosis,” he said.

Next generation sequencing begins with a blastocyst biopsy, a minor and common procedure where doctors collect multiple eggs. They take the eggs and expose them to sperm and five days later, doctors can examine the developed embryos.

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“(With next generation sequencing) we can mass produce the DNA sequence and within a 16-hour turnaround, can know which embryos are normal and which ones aren’t,” Glassner said.

Scheidts and Levy say the sequencing is worth it if it helps people avoid the agony of having a miscarriage. For their part, they’re proud that Connor is a part of history.