Every year, approximately 20 million people worldwide are confronted with the fact that they cannot have children without IVF. However, assisted reproduction is accessible to barely 1% of those worldwide who need it. If all intended parents were able to access IVF, 10 million babies would be born annually rather than the present 1 million.
A central tenet of the problem is the makeup of the current IVF laboratory. Workflows revolve around largely manual steps to manipulate gametes and embryos. This makes IVF labs costly to build and difficult to scale.
Conceivable Life Sciences is a startup venture that aims to automate the various manual steps in the embryology laboratory. The company believes this will increase specimen safety and success rates, and dramatically reduce the cost of setting up and operating an IVF laboratory.
What made you want to join Conceivable?
The vision of Conceivable is ultimately to increase access for patients who need fertility treatment—specifically IVF. When you look at other areas of medicine, the application of technology has resulted in better treatments and greater access to those treatments. IVF, on the other hand, is largely reserved for those who can afford it. We think it is time for a change in thinking here, and numerous other pioneers in the field agree with us. It is really an exciting opportunity to work with these thought leaders, who believe the same things we do.
In addition, the opportunity to work with two of the founders of TMRW Life Sciences again was another huge draw to the company. They foster an environment of curiosity and collaboration that is unlike that of any other company at which I’ve had the good fortune to work.
Your company operates in three countries on two different continents. Talk about the challenges associated with that.
I think it is a strength of the company, as opposed to a challenge. Access to IVF is a worldwide problem. It isn’t about bringing about change in one geographic area. It is about providing a therapy to everyone who needs it, globally.
To that end, this team has to be diverse. We have a group of very talented engineers based in Guadalajara, Mexico. We also have embryology and advanced optics teams in the United Kingdom. In addition, there are a host of other collaborators that are located elsewhere throughout Europe and North America. It is very exciting to work with such a geographically diverse team.
What can we hope to see from Conceivable in the future?
We are hard at work trying to increase the number of functions we can automate within the embryology and andrology labs. But we are not automating the labs simply for automation’s sake. We believe that we can help dramatically improve cell handling and therefore specimen safety. If that is true, it could—and should—translate into an increase in IVF success rates.
At Conceivable, the job isn’t done until we can increase access for those who require IVF. There are tens of thousands of people—and that is probably being conservative—who need assisted reproduction to start a family. The cost of the services prevents many from accessing IVF. This is our guiding principle, and we hope to change the way IVF is performed. Establishing a new model is never easy, but we have made it our goal and hope to positively affect the lives of many who need IVF but cannot afford it.