Rebekah Jordan sits with Marty Gauvin, CEO of Fertilis, to discuss its IVF treatment innovation that replicates nature and automates the cell culture process, as well as its potential applications in regenerative medicine.
Key insights:
- Fertilis technology offers improvement in IVF success rates and a faster time to pregnancy by removing an entire cycle.
- The technology involves an artificial cell culture environment when the conditions can be precisely controlled to mimic nature, and ensure the best outcomes.
- Fertilis is expanding into potential treatments in regenerative medicine that require stem cell research such as; vision loss and cystic fibrosis.
From business idea to innovative product
After 40 years of IVF research, Marty Gauvin and his lifelong friend, Jeremy Thompson, came together with a business idea.
Marty is a serial entrepreneur who founded many medical device and tech companies, Jeremy has a strong reputation in the embryologic research industry, and together they formed Fertilis.
Fertilis was founded on the idea that if you could keep a cell - in this case a single cell embryo - in a very small cradle, you could control its environmental conditions very precisely. The problem was how to design such a small yet practical box. Until 2018 came and the innovative 3D printed micro-medical device measured 0.01 to 1.0 mm across or “about the width of a human hair.”
“We got together in building the business case. We approached a venture capital fund, Horizons Ventures, and they backed us in our seed round and we've been developing the technology and progressing our science ever since,” Marty explained.
Since then, Fertilis has based its mission on changing the way scientists and embryologists work with cells by mimicking nature to make cell culture dynamic and more automated.
Mimicking the environment
Naturally, in the body, cells live in a dynamic environment. A constant slow flow of fluid – called interstitial fluid - passes along the cells that ensures a continuous process of cell absorption and excretion.
However, cell culture is a static process. The cell grows in a “drop of media that doesn’t change until you move or change it”. Essentially, the best way a cell can survive outside in the body is to grow the cell in a culture that is as close to a replication of the body’s environment as possible.
Marty explains: “What we're doing is removing the kind of human aspect of the control. So, we’re automating it, but we’re also controlling the environment - the flow of fluid around the embryo - in the same way as it is in inside the human body. This mimic of nature then improves the outcomes that you see from the cell culture process.”
Closing the gap
“The most successful [IVF] clinics see very high success rates, by way of comparison, into the 40% range. The least successful clinics are getting success rates of around 11%. And that's correcting for all the different kinds of risk factors for instance, patient ages.”
Fertilis wanted to close this gap and overcome the spread of success. Marty says that Fertilis technology offers improvement in IVF success rates and a faster time to pregnancy, by removing an entire cycle.
“Current cell culture works in millilitres and hours. Fertilis works in nanolitres and milliseconds,” Marty adds. “So, what would usually be three cycles, our device will do in two cycles. Or what might take five cycles in slightly older patients, will now take four, and so forth.”
Applications in regenerative medicine
The field of cell therapies and regenerative medicine relies upon taking stem cells and putting them through a process called differentiation. This is a process of taking a stem cell and turning it into the kind of cell that you want using various gene therapy techniques. In terms of IVF, an early embryo is the original stem cell.
Easy to say, not easy to do.
“It's like a very complex multi-step kind of recipe by way of changing the environment the cells are in, which makes them change into what you want, but they don't change all at the same time and they don't all change in the same way.”
Even minor changes to the environment can impact the cell’s growth factors or chemical balance, resulting in a completely different type of cell.
Rather than generalising the control factors across the cells, precisely controlling the conditions for each individual cell type ensures that you will get the kind of cell you want back, improving the overall outcome.
“We also we allow our cell therapy scientists to come up with more sophisticated treatments, that’ll produce better cells because they can complete a more complex recipe on those cells.” This, in turn could lead to potential treatments that require stem cell research such as; vision loss, cystic fibrosis and some cancers.
“We talk to people about their cell culture, whether it might be tissue or gene therapy and they will say they just use the ‘standard process’. And doing that can actually have a real significant effect on the quality, the yield, and ultimately the price of the cells. So, we see this as quite a ripe area for innovation.”
Moreover, a lot of stem cell treatments never make it to market. For one, treatments are very challenging to make accurate, which makes it hard to get regulatory approval for them. Secondly, they can be quite random in their activity and this lack of consistency can make each generation of treatment very costly. This shouldn’t be the case if you have a repeatable process.
Marty concludes: “We definitely see really strong opportunities, both in the regenerative medicine area and in the IVF area. Both of those aspects will be part of our strategy moving forward.”
After recently recruiting a stem cell scientist, Fertilis has been looking to expand further into the stem cell research sector and further partner with a number of companies in terms of bringing this technology to the stem cell market.