Professor Alan Trounson, the scientist who led the team responsible for Australia's first IVF birth in 1980, is challenging fertility specialists to put people ahead of profits in a provocative speech to a conference in Melbourne this weekend.

The stem cell expert who introduced two world-first procedures that improved IVF success rates said the cost of IVF in Australia did not reflect the outlay by clinics or specialists, but rather supply and demand.

"The barrier to change is that medical professionals don't want to charge less because they make so much from treatments. They charge what the market will handle," he said in a statement released ahead of his appearance at the Society for Reproductive Biology forum Making Babies in the 21st Century.

The attack comes amid growing commercialisation of IVF in Australia, causing some to fear profit-driven business models will undermine the integrity of fertility medicine. Over the past 14 months, two of the largest providers - Monash IVF Group and Virtus Health, which runs Melbourne IVF, IVF Australia and the Queensland Fertility Group - have floated on the stockmarket with great success.

Professor Trounson, who made an undisclosed amount of money out of the sale of Monash IVF in 2007, said his Low Cost IVF Foundation could do a basic cycle for about $500 in Africa and Mexico, and that despite making this known, no Australian specialists had asked for his advice to try to emulate it. He said while Australian clinics may face costs associated with regulation, there was no reason why they could not cut prices, especially through automation in their laboratories to replace costly staff.

In Australia, most clinics charge about $8500 for an IVF cycle, but after Medicare rebates, the out-of-pocket cost is about $3000-$4000. Most clinics say these cycles have a 30 to 40 per cent success rate of a live birth, depending on the woman's age and circumstances.

There is also a small number of "low-cost" clinics emerging in lower socio-economic areas which perform IVF without a choice of doctor or additional services such as sperm and egg donation or pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. These clinics advertise out-of-pocket fees ranging from $500 to $2000 per cycle and some do not offer embryo freezing for further attempts in future.

While the clinics are still new, one provider has estimated lower success rates of about 25 per cent per cycle. The main reason for this difference is that the clinics use less hormone stimulation to retrieve fewer eggs for fewer embryos. This means that if a woman is not successful in the first cycle, she will require repetitive stimulation for egg production and more surgical procedures to retrieve eggs.

In contrast, full-cost clinics usually use high-dose hormone stimulation to produce a lot of eggs for one surgical egg retrieval procedure to create as many embryos as possible. The embryos can then be frozen for transfer into the woman's uterus for future pregnancy attempts.

Professor Trounson said his foundation had also used a low-stimulation drug to produce less eggs, which meant a clinician could retrieve eggs from the woman in a few minutes with sedation, instead of a general anaesthetic. He said the success rate in dozens of women had been about 25 per cent per cycle. But he added that this was only suitable for women under the age of 38 and would not be used if men had sperm abnormalities that required other technology.

The CEOs of Monash IVF Group and City Fertility said Professor Trounson's $500 model was unrealistic for a developed country like Australia where clinics aim for gold standard, individualised treatment and employ highly qualified staff.

Monash IVF CEO James Thiedeman said while his group aimed to make a profit for shareholders and did let the market decide the price, it also reinvested money into innovation to improve success rates and training of staff. He said there were no plans for automation of his clinics' processes.

"We're dealing with people's gametes here, so I'm always a little bit wary of automation," he said.

Adnan Catakovic, CEO and Scientific Director for City Fertility Centre, said while anyone could do a "cheap and nasty" IVF cycle, success rates were more likely to be 10 to 15 per cent with low-stimulation cycles, not 25 per cent. He said his group had no plans for automation and that it was "offensive" to hear such comments from Professor Trounson after he had made "a motza" out of the sale of Monash IVF.

"I think in the initial sale he made a fortune," Mr Catakovic said. "He is the Clive Palmer of IVF... He just loves stirring the pot."

A spokeswoman for Virtus Health declined to comment.