Institut Marquès Barcelona

Institut Marquès is a private assisted reproduction centre run by the Marquès family of gynaecologists, with its headquarters on Avinguda Diagonal in the Les Corts district of Barcelona, near Plaça de Maria Cristina. The family practice dates from 1922, when Dr. Vicens Marquès i Bertran began working as a gynaecologist in the city, and the current medical director, Dr. Borja Marquès, is the fourth generation. The family installed an IVF laboratory in the operating rooms of Clínica Quirón in 1989, set up a preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) laboratory in 2005 and opened the present Barcelona clinic in December 2017. The group also has centres in Sabadell, Rome and Milan.

The clinic has an open waiting space instead of a traditional reception desk, and its areas are themed on nature and named after landscapes such as the sky, the river and the valley. Patients can look into the IVF laboratory through a window, and the clinic's Embryomobile app shows embryos developing in time-lapse incubators 24 hours a day. The Barcelona laboratory is split into two independent areas so that it can keep working every day of the year while equipment is serviced or calibrated. It uses anti-vibration worktables and air filtration against volatile organic compounds, and biologists work in pairs, each checking the other's procedures. Treatment with the patients' own eggs and sperm includes IVF with ICSI, PGT by next-generation sequencing, blastocyst culture, vitrification of eggs, embryos and sperm, intrauterine insemination and andrology care, including surgical sperm retrieval.

Each patient is assigned a gynaecologist specialising in assisted reproduction, a medical assistant, a personal assistant for non-medical matters and an embryologist. For patients travelling from abroad, the patient care service and medical assistants are available remotely, treatment is scheduled so that patients travel only when necessary, and the medical team advises which appointments must take place in Barcelona. The clinic arranges private transfers through a partner company, lists partner hotels near the clinic and has an international francophone department.