Vicken Sahakian, MD

About

The refund-and-retry financial programs that are now common in US IVF — a clinic prices a block of cycles and absorbs part of the cost if they do not work — are described on Pacific Fertility Center Los Angeles’s own account as a structure Dr. Vicken Sahakian helped create. That is a company-stated origin claim rather than an independently dated one, but it explains how he practices: he is the physician listed as medical director on the clinic’s SART registry record, and the person accountable for the cycle volume that record shows.

He earned his biology degree and his MD at the American University of Beirut, trained in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, then completed a reproductive endocrinology and infertility fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His practice biography lists board certification in both OB-GYN and REI from the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He joined PFCLA in the 1990s and has led its medical team since; before and alongside that, he taught for more than ten years in UCLA’s obstetrics and gynecology department.

His clinical work concentrates on the patients who need the most planning rather than the most medication: same-sex couples and single patients building families, women treating infertility at advanced maternal age, including post-menopausal patients carrying pregnancies from donor eggs, and third-party reproduction generally. He works in Arabic, French, English, and Armenian. His biography credits him personally with more than 10,000 IVF cycles and more than 7,000 births — cumulative career numbers reported by the clinic, not an audited count, and separate from the practice’s SART line of 1,865 cycles in 2024, which covers all its physicians together.

Clinical Expertise

• IVF cycle direction: stimulation protocols, antagonist and long protocols, trigger timing, and transfer decisions across the clinic’s two Los Angeles offices
• LGBTQ+ family building: reciprocal IVF, donor egg and donor sperm paths, and gestational carrier arrangements for male partners, with California parentage law handling the legal side
• Advanced maternal age and diminished reserve: counseling on realistic per-cycle odds, and when to move a patient to donor eggs rather than repeat failed autologous cycles
• Donor egg programs: recruitment, screening, and matching through the clinic’s own donor program
• Gestational carrier cycles: medical screening of carriers and synchronization of the intended mother’s or donor’s cycle with the carrier’s uterus
• Fertility preservation: egg and embryo vitrification, including for patients delaying childbearing
• Value-based pricing design: the shared-risk financial model is the program he is credited with building, which makes cycle-cost structure part of his practice, not an administrative afterthought

Why Choose Dr. Vicken Sahakian

He signs the registry data. As the medical director named on the clinic’s SART record, his practice is the one whose 2024 numbers — 41.0% live birth per intended retrieval under age 35, 21.1% at 38-40 — you can look up independently by clinic ID.

A decade of academic teaching behind the private practice. Years on UCLA’s obstetrics and gynecology faculty show up in how conditions are worked up, and patients transferring from academic centers usually find the record familiar.

Depth in the hardest case mix. Post-menopausal family building, donor egg cycles, and gestational carrier work are the areas his published biography foregrounds, and he has been doing them at one clinic long enough to have seen the long-term outcomes of his own protocols.

Four languages. Arabic, French, English, and Armenian cover a large share of the international patients the clinic reports serving.

Ask him about the money. Few reproductive endocrinologists helped design the refund-model pricing that now exists at this clinic, and few will walk a patient through which cycles it applies to.

Professional Affiliations

American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology certification in Obstetrics and Gynecology and in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, per his practice biography. His biography also lists membership in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Medical director of record for SART ClinicPKID 2001091. Training lineage: University of Iowa residency and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill fellowship, with UCLA faculty appointment in obstetrics and gynecology.

Suitable For

• Same-sex couples and single patients: the family-building path his practice is explicitly built around
• Patients over 40 considering their own eggs: candid per-cycle odds, and a clear conversation about when donor eggs change the math
• Post-menopausal patients: donor egg pregnancies carried in the patient’s own uterus are a stated focus
• Gestational carrier and donor egg cases needing coordination: intended-parent work where medical and legal steps have to run in parallel
• Anyone shopping shared-risk pricing: the program design he is credited with, and its eligibility conditions
• Arabic- or French-speaking patients: consultation in language, not through an interpreter chain