PFCLA Lab Location, Technology, and Procedures

I In the aftermath of the devastating fires in Los Angeles County in January 2025, we received many questions from our current and previous patients about the safety of our locations in the county and our laboratory procedures to operate in emergency and air quality-compromised environments. In this article I’ll review the location of our laboratory in Los Angeles, the technology we have in place to create and store embryos, the emergency procedures we have in place in the event of a natural or man-made disaster, and the air quality monitoring we conduct to ensure our patient’s embryos have a maximum chance of success by minimizing the risk of exposure to environmental hazards caused by the fires or other outside sources.

PFCLA’s Location and Structural Buildout

Pacific Fertility Center Los Angeles’s primary facility is located on Westwood Blvd in the heart of Los Angeles, close to the 405 freeway, the Los Angeles VA, and UCLA. When selecting the location for our facility, we intended to choose a location that minimized the risk of man-made or natural disasters impacting our operations. The Oppenheimer Tower, in which the building is located, is a 34-story skyscraper built of concrete and steel. The building is a Type 1 fire rated building, which means it is highly resistant to internal and external fire danger based on its composition of building materials. The tower is located in the central business district surrounded solely by other Type 1 fire rated buildings. The building also contains a modern fire suppression system of sprinklers. In September 2023 the building has a Reg 4 examination by the Los Angeles Fire Department which checked the entire building to verify that all structural conditions and internal systems are up to code to maintain its fire rated standard. PFCLA’s own facility was commissioned in February 2023 where all new fire systems were installed as part of the buildout.

Seismic activity is always top of mind for building engineers in Los Angeles. As a tall skyscraper in Los Angeles, the Oppenheimer Tower was built on a very deep foundation of bedrock and meets current California building codes for tall buildings. Facilities located in smaller 1-2 story buildings face a far higher risk of building collapse than a skyscraper. Clean air without particulate matter or Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) contamination is essential for an IVF laboratory. While not quite at the standard of a semiconductor facility clean room, outside contaminants can impact the growth and therefore success rates of embryos so all precautions must be taken to ensure that any potential exposure is minimized. The Oppenheimer Tower has MERV 13 level filters on its intake and recirculated air, which can filter out smoke, bacteria, molds and fungi, and many viruses. The building is owned by Douglas Emmett, one of the largest commercial landlords in Los Angeles. Douglas Emmett has a team of engineers that monitor air quality around all their buildings in the city and will shut off intake air in a building if the local air quality exceeds recommended levels to prevent airborne particulates from being admitted into the building (much in the way you can toggle your car system from intake to recirculate).

When building our new facility in 2023, we designed the laboratory with the latest technology and IVF laboratory standards in mind. The lab has its own separate HVAC system that maintains a positive-pressure air environment, where air is pushed outward to ensure any remaining particles admitted through the building air don’t settle into cultures of specimens. The separate HVAC system has its own additional layers of filters to be safe, and we have additional VOC and HEPA filters within the lab space to ensure further filtration.

Power interruption is always a concern when handing biological specimens, as it is critical to maintaining appropriate culture conditions, particularly when embryos are involved. To ensure stability, PFCLA has in place two systems to provide uninterrupted power in the event of power outage. The first system is a UPS, or uninterrupted power supply, consisting of several large batteries and a power conditioner. This protects against momentary power loss and voltage spikes which can be damaging to sensitive equipment and incubators. For prolonged power concerns, PFCLA has installed its own, fully dedicated backup generator at the Oppenheimer Tower to ensure continuous operation of key equipment in an outage. The generator is diesel-powered and can operate for days, or even weeks if necessary. The generator’s fuel is replenished regularly with routine monthly tests and annual inspections. It is important to note that in the event of a major disaster or threat to the building the primary focus of our team is to stabilize all specimens in a manner that is not reliant on a continuous power source or controlled culture conditions. Our main tool in this effort is the emergency cryopreservation of all active specimens - placing them in a state of suspended animation. Once cryopreserved, specimens may be moved or left unattended for up to several months with no outside resources needed. This would represent a last resort scenario but demonstrates our ability to lock down the clinic while still providing an extremely high level of safety for all patient specimens and embryos.

Finally, security is a top priority where such sensitive material as eggs, sperm, and embryos are concerned. PFCLA takes security very seriously and has installed a state-of-the-art security system to protect its laboratory operation. Lab access is limited by electronic badge access to only our embryologists and company leadership. Surveillance cameras are in place that provide video recordings of key areas of the facility. We also have active door monitoring and other security precautions in place to ensure we are providing a high level of personnel and physical security to our facility, patients, and staff.

PFCLA Laboratory Technology

While shutting down the clinic and laboratory is a last-ditch approach to protecting our patient’s specimens, we have a range of technologies in place that maintain a safe, clean, controlled environment for the handling and culture of embryos on a daily basis. Working from the outside in, we have the previously mentioned positive pressure HVAC system which provides clean, filtered air to the laboratory. This minimizes the risk of contamination by outside VOCs or toxic particulates. Once inside the lab, we utilize free-standing HEPA and VOC filters to further condition the air, so that anything which has bypassed our HVAC system will be caught by this secondary line of defense. When directly handling embryos, we have two systems in place. For routine handling with little external risk, we use laminar flow workstations. These are covered lab benches with a positive pressure, directional airflow arrangement which repels contaminants from the work area. For more dire circumstances, or when we simply do not know the quality of the air, we also have an isolette workstation. This is a fully enclosed lab bench which used a specially created mix of compressed gases to establish a large, hospitable, positive pressure space with a fully contained microscope and arm access ports to handle embryos and gametes.

When we are not working directly with embryos, they are kept in very advanced incubators which maintain ideal conditions for their growth by regulating humidity, pH, oxygen tension, and temperature. PFCLA currently has two types of incubators for this process. The first are called benchtop incubators and they allow us to culture each patient’s embryos or gametes in an individual chamber in complete isolation. We use these for short term culture. For longer term culture – typically out to 7 days – we use a very specialized and advanced type of incubator called an Embryoscope. These are completely self-contained units with integrated robotic microscopes which allow us to seal the embryos away and monitor them for the duration of culture without ever opening the door. These are truly the perfect mechanism for isolating and protecting the embryos from any outside environmental concerns. The one shortcoming of all these instruments, however, is the need for power. This is why, when conditions become severe or risky enough, we turn to cryopreservation as our ultimate safeguard. Cryopreservation works by cooling eggs, sperm, and embryos to the temperature of Liquid Nitrogen: -196°C (or -321°F). At this temperature the cells remain alive but perfectly preserved in a state of suspended animation. We keep them at this temperature by submerging them in liquid nitrogen in what looks like a giant thermos bottle called a dewar. Liquid nitrogen storage dewars (LN2 Dewars) are passive devices capable of maintaining an appropriate internal temperature for more than two months if they are undisturbed – with no need for power or other support. They are also very resistant to outside conditions, as they were originally designed to be kept in a barn (a lot of our technology is derived from the livestock and agricultural industries where they must be far more robust than in a typical lab setting). So that we are always prepared for a worst-case scenario, PFCLA contracts with a dedicated supplier of liquid nitrogen to ensure our dewars are always full and that we have an excess of the liquid available for any contingency.

In addition to these lab-based technologies, PFCLA has invested in an extremely sensitive air quality monitoring system capable of detecting harmful VOCs at levels well below their anticipated toxic threshold. With this system we can predict and react to outside threats before they impact the culture environment.

Emergency Procedures in Place

To summarize the process by which PFCLA assesses and reacts to an emergency the following list describes the response according to threat:

1. Power failure – The generator and the UPS system allow the lab and OR to operate indefinitely in the event the power is cut off to the building
2. Environmental threat – Should air quality deteriorate below acceptable thresholds, the building will be placed on internal air recirculation only, and air quality within the lab will be continually monitored. Should the VOC level exceed acceptable thresholds, protocols will be implemented to reduce embryo and gamete exposure outside of the incubators until the threat has passed.
3. Power failure with a weather or localized emergency – The generator and the UPS system allow the lab and OR to operate indefinitely, however the situation will be continually monitored in anticipation of a lab shutdown due to restricted access to the building or a threat to the back-up power supply. The lab will undertake strategic cryopreservation and embryo transfer as necessary, with the goal being to minimize the impact on patient schedules and cycle plans.
4. Potential restrictive threat to building access (the 2025 LA fires, for example) - The lab and OR will continue to operate on a regular schedule with heightened monitoring of changing conditions and preparedness for an immediate shutdown and evacuation, as necessary.
5. Acute threat to the building (internal fire, bomb threat, etc.) - specimens in the lab will be stabilized and the building will be evacuated. Even without power, the lab can operate for several hours before conditions become unfavorable for the embryos and gametes. The goal of this approach is to first protect all occupants of the building and when possible, return to address the state of the lab and specimens when it is safe to do so. Cryopreserved specimens are not affected by such events unless they are directly involved or targeted.
6. Acute long-term threat to the building (Earthquake, etc.) - The first priority in such an event is to evacuate and protect all occupants of the building. This will likely require rapid evacuation from the structure and local area. As time permits the lab will be stabilized and locked down. As previously mentioned, cryopreserved specimens are not affected by such events unless they are directly involved in the event. Working with local emergency response teams, the logistics of a return to the building will be assessed, and if building access is unlikely for a prolonged period of time, PFCLA contracts with a long term cryostorage facility to remove all LN2 dewars from the building to a secure and remote location.
7. Imminent threat to the building (Fire is predicted to directly impact the building or limit access to the building for a prolonged period, etc.) - In the unlikely event that a threat is predicted to directly affect the building or restrict access for a prolonged period of time (several weeks or longer), all specimens will be stabilized and cryopreserved. The clinic will then be locked down and specimens will be evacuated to a secure remote location with a contracted cryostorage facility.

As described above, all specimens stored at our facility have multiple forms of security and redundancy. That combined with the location and structure of the building, suggests that relocating specimens to an alternative site is not likely to be necessary. However, if that was the case for any reason, PFCLA has a specimen evacuation plan and protocol in place. We have developed the plan with a leading cryostorage vendor that provides short- and long-term storage and transport of specimens in vehicles designed for that purpose.

The plan begins with transportation of the tanks via specialized vehicles with GPS tracking and temperature monitoring to an existing cryostorage site well outside the area of fire risk. The tanks then move into the storage facility. This facility has an advanced security system monitoring consistent with industry best practice.

After the emergency, the specimens would be transported back utilizing the same transportation protocols. Air Quality Monitoring. As one can see, air quality and environmental control is paramount to the operation of a reproductive lab. At PFCLA we utilize multiple layers of protection to establish a stable and optimized culture environment, ranging from the building air quality to the conditions within the incubators themselves. We also monitor all these conditions through various pieces of equipment that detect VOCs, the gas concentrations within the incubators, and the pH and dissolved gas concentrations in culture media. The question you may ask, however, is why these factors are so important? The simple answer is that the specimens we work with – sperm, eggs, and embryos – are biologically designed to exist inside of the human body. Outside of the body, in culture, we are forced to replicate their natural conditions as closely as possible, or they will lose their ability to establish a pregnancy. Since these specimens lack a human body to protect them, they are especially vulnerable to environmental toxins in the form of toxic particulates and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Particulates are easy to control for and are usually the lowest concern we have. Filters, covers, and positive pressure do an excellent job of keeping them out of culture. In embryology, VOCs are the real villain. A VOC is literally anything you can smell, although for an embryo a VOC concentrated enough to smell is usually already too toxic. VOCs can come from anywhere, whether it’s fresh pavement outside the building or the fumes from a burning building, and the effects on embryos can be severe. At their least impactful, VOCs contribute to a reduced chance of pregnancy and at their most they can result in total embryo arrest, where no embryos develop to the point that they may be transferred. For this reason, monitoring air quality in and around the lab is one of our greatest tools in determining when and if events like the ongoing fires are likely to impact your chance of conceiving.