Universitäres Kinderwunschzentrum Lübeck

Anyone familiar with the history of reproductive medicine in Germany will inevitably come across Lübeck: at what is now the University Fertility Center (Universitäres Kinderwunschzentrum) of the UKSH, Germany’s first IVF baby was born in 1982. This pioneering role is not a museum showpiece but the starting point of a center that is still actively conducting research today. In 2011, the magazine Laborjournal identified the team as the most-cited research group on reproductive medicine and biology in Germany. The center has two locations: in Lübeck (Ratzeburger Allee) and in Großhansdorf near Hamburg at the Parkklinik Manhagen. The medical range extends from IVF and ICSI through insemination and cryopreservation to services that are often missing elsewhere: TESE procedures (testicular biopsy), fertility surgery, donor treatments, and preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). The center describes itself as the only one in northern Germany that offers andrology, reproductive surgery, and PGT entirely from a single source. For fertility preservation before therapies that damage germ cells, such as chemotherapy, statutory health insurance funds in Germany have covered, since July 2021 and under certain conditions, the costs of cryopreserving eggs or sperm cells. The center informs patients and referring doctors about this and provides the necessary forms. The connection to the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH) provides access to neighboring disciplines and to ongoing clinical studies. Most recently, a UKSH study was published on the relationship between combinations of bacteria in the microbiome and the success of assisted reproduction, a topic that fundamentally calls common predictive tests into question. Research results from the center were recognized in 2024 at the congress of the German Society of Gynecology and Obstetrics.