The new company is removing some human factors from human creation.

In the fall of 2019, California couple Daphna and Alexander Cardinal welcomed a baby girl with the help of IVF. According to a CBS report, an "instinct" led to genetic testing, and it turned out that Daphne's child was not actually theirs. Their fertility center revealed that another couple-who transferred their fertilized eggs around the same time-had given birth to the cardinal's child. The November 2021 lawsuit revealed that in January 2020, the couple replaced their 4-month-old child with a child living full-time with their biological parents.

The story of this conception transition may sound like the story of Virgin Jane, but according to North Carolina embryologist Alease Daniel (Alease Daniel), this kind of accident is not as rare as you think, and it is not as rare as you think. So surprising. "The exchange of embryos and sperm is the result of embryologists pulling too thinly," she told Bustle. "There are very few well-trained embryologists, and they are far from each other."

Since the birth of the first baby conceived by IVF in 1978, more than 8 million people worldwide have been born using this technology, but the success rate per cycle is still less than 50%. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, as of 2018, one-third of Americans have either used IVF or knew someone who has used IVF. According to Crunchbase, despite a decline in the overall birth rate, venture capital funding for fertility startups has increased by 89% in the past year. Although embryo exchange may be the most extreme example, for prospective parents receiving treatment, many artificial intelligence-driven IVF startups hope to solve many difficulties, inefficiencies and mistakes.

During the IVF cycle, well-trained embryologists study sperm and eggs to detect viable candidates for successful fertilization. They use hair-thin needles, microscopes, and stable hands to combine healthy sperm and eggs to create embryos, which are then transferred to the uterus. "As long as humans are doing this work, there will never be a 0% error rate," Daniel said. "The computer doesn't get tired from doing the same work every day. It doesn't drink too much coffee, and it doesn't shake or mess up."

According to Dr. Mohamed Taha, CEO and co-founder of Mojo Fertility, Mojo Fertility is a start-up company that provides home semen collection and artificial intelligence analysis. Technicians may prevent IVF from producing higher live birth rates. "Even the slightest mistake can cause the egg-which is a very scarce cell-to be destroyed," said Taha, who is also a nanotechnology researcher at Lyon Central Polytechnic Institute and a long-term investor in the healthcare sector. .

Taha said that leaving aside the mistakes, there is still much room for improvement in IVF. "Traditional IVF has [an] unnecessary emotional and financial burdens." He pointed out that there is a 75% chance that the first IVF cycle will not lead to pregnancy because it is usually exploratory. According to data from the Assisted Reproductive Technology Association, although the success rate of women under 35 years of age using their own eggs rose from 23.5% in 1982 to 48.6% in 2019, a successful pregnancy usually requires at least two to three rounds of treatment. According to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures, each round may require $12,000 to $17,000 out-of-pocket, which tracks state laws regarding infertility treatment insurance coverage. The cost of IVF is pushed up by the fact that embryologists-they need a bachelor's degree, followed by two to three years of on-the-job training, usually after starting to work as an andrologist-are difficult to obtain.

Kathryn, 27, a health care coordinator in Florida, has been trying to conceive via IVF for two years. She added that her experience was "too difficult." "If you are undergoing IVF, you have waited too long to support your family, so all the obstacles-waiting for laboratory [and] paperwork, appointments, results-will only delay your time and exceed your tolerance. Ability," she told Hustle. "Once, I had to wait five days for a semen analysis, but I knew it would take a few minutes. This was because the laboratory had a backup."

Although the age of mothers and fathers (or donors) is the biggest challenge in finding healthy sperm and eggs, preemptive fertility care and techniques can improve the family's chances of conception with fewer trials. At Mojo, Taha is using artificial intelligence to improve the success rate of IVF in a variety of ways. At the back end, the company is building a platform that relies on high-power microscopes and robotics to find the most viable sperm and eggs. On the consumer side, Mojo offers semen analysis kits. For only $150, a man can carefully prepare a specimen at home and have the Mojo team take it away for a quick and detailed evaluation. (The service will only be available in Sweden and London, UK in 2022.) This process also helps to improve their internal products: the more data the platform collects, the better it understands how to find viable sperm, and the faster it will be It can do so soon. The home test is also designed to influence the young male population to consider their fertility. "Younger frozen sperm means a higher probability of having a healthier baby, especially when combined with larger eggs," Taha explained.

From there, Mojo hopes to use robotic technology to fertilize viable eggs and sperm at a fraction of the cost of traditional IVF clinics and storage centers. In "Connected World 2022" (the magazine's annual trend forecast), Taha claimed that his robot "can complete tasks that a skilled laboratory technician takes 30 minutes to complete in four minutes." He told Bustle that “robot technology will greatly reduce the cost of operating the clinic” and pointed out that the space occupied by the computer is much smaller than the space required in the laboratory. "In a few years, IVF may become a subscription service that many people have, such as Spotify, where you can freeze sperm, eggs or embryos at an affordable cost each month."

For Daniel, the impact of artificial intelligence on home test kits will not affect the success rate of IVF because they will allow people to understand their fertility more quickly. "Semen analysis is actually very cheap. When the sample is brought into the laboratory, manual analysis takes about 5 minutes. It sounds like AI is not fast at doing this," she said.

Although Mojo's home test kit is not necessarily related to a higher chance of conception for the tested couple, the test itself helps to increase the IVF success rate for everyone. "If men test and freeze their healthy sperm in their 20s or 30s, we can suggest using frozen, healthier sperm instead of sperm with damaged DNA. [...] This will not only help Increasing the IVF rate will also help ensure healthy families," Taha said, adding that stronger sperm can also reduce the risk of miscarriage.

Other fertility startups are beginning to rely on the accuracy of artificial intelligence. Mira was established in 2018. It uses home laboratory-level hormone tracking to detect ovulation and helps women plan pregnancy more accurately. Founded in 2020, Alife is a software program that uses data from past successful IVF trials to find a winning model for viable sperm and eggs.

Life Whisperer is a cloud-based application founded in 2016. Artificial intelligence can help embryologists assess the quality of embryos and the possibility of giving birth to healthy full-term babies. "This technology can help embryologists decide which embryos to transfer to patients so that they can choose the best embryos first and save unnecessary IVF treatments," the company's co-founder and CEO Dr. Michelle Perugini told Bustle. "The program is as simple as dragging and dropping embryo images from a standard laboratory microscope system to a web application. Artificial intelligence technology can analyze the images and score them in a few seconds." Perugini said, the results will be lively The success rate of specimens has increased to more than 70%.

For Daniel, she believes that the most profound way AI can improve work is to eliminate the risk of confusion through patient identification and verification. In other words, she pointed out that the cost of existing products was prohibitively high, and she cited a clinic-oriented solution that cost about $50,000. She added that Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) is a technique commonly used in male infertility. Injecting a single sperm cell directly into the egg can also be improved by artificial intelligence technology, otherwise it is done manually of.

Taha said that Mojo's goal is not only to improve the reputation of IVF in the next ten years, but also to make childbearing an equal share of the responsibility of men and women. "Unfortunately, a couple underwent IVF before sperm testing," he said, noting that most of the people he talked to did not seriously investigate male infertility before having IVF. (Daniel points out that preliminary semen analysis is not always decisive, especially when it comes to DNA fragmentation that is common with age.) Taha's goal is to reduce the burden on women and the taboos of men, allowing them to plan their parents You can easily understand your fertility long before the journey begins. Catherine added: “Women are under tremendous pressure to understand themselves prematurely, and they don’t put pressure on men until much later.” When referring to the significant decline in sperm concentration in men over the past half century, Taha pointed out that “fertility is not one thing. It’s an easy thing. Of course, couples often wait until there is a problem before trying to solve it.​​"

Although it will take years for the clinic to sign enough research and data to widely implement artificial intelligence technology in fertility treatments, Daniel hopes that the artificial intelligence program will "complement human work" to significantly reduce errors, adding that the machine will take over her work. The prospects, even in the end, are "terrible".

Perugini said that putting aside the fear of singularities, high-tech data-driven tools and robotic accuracy will become valuable assets for clinicians and increase success rates. "Due to its objectivity and predictive ability, artificial intelligence has broad prospects in the field of IVF, and it is very likely to improve the standard of care."

But for now, we are still in the "Wild West Era of the American Fertility Industry", as the Cardinals (embryo exchange victim) lawyer Adam Wolf said in a press conference on November 9th. . Although Kathryn said she knows very little about artificial intelligence, she would not object to its use. "If computers can do better than humans, what do we have to lose?"