Innovation

GLOBAL INVESTOR FOCUS Innovation — 38
Fertility
Infertility increases with age
First child birth by age group in the USA
%
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Percent infertile Percent chance of remaining childless
20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 40–44
90000
80000
60000
40000
20000
0
Age 35–39 Age 40–44
1970 1986 1997
Women today lead rich and demanding lives, full of opportunities.
As a result, many of them choose to start their families later in life.
But nature isn’t fair. While men can father children in their golden
years, the female biological clock is far less forgiving. A woman’s
fertility begins to decline at age 27 and significantly deteriorates
after 35. By 40, her odds of conceiving are only about 5% each
month. Currently the most widely used treatment for couples that
would like to have children later in life is in vitro fertilization, but in
the past few years there is increasing excitement about the new
technology of oocyte cryopreservation, or egg freezing.
One innovator in this field is Christy Jones, founder and CEO
of Extend Fertility, a company that works with leading reproductive
and medical research centers around the USA to offer women
the opportunity to prolong their fertility using innovative eggfreezing
technology. A seasoned entrepreneur with a successful
track record of bringing new technologies to market, Christy was
featured three times on the cover of Forbes, named a Top 100
Young Innovator by MIT “Technology Review” and billed as one of
the Top 20 Leaders under 30 by “Working Woman” magazine.
Until recently, the procedure of egg freezing was restricted to
young women facing chemotherapy, but since 2004, Extend Fertility
offers it to any woman with healthy ovaries. Jones says that
currently 60% of her clients go through the procedure for nonmedical
reasons. While egg freezing does not guarantee a successful
pregnancy, “it can greatly improve a woman’s chances of
conceiving at age 40 and older, and gives women a sense of empowerment
that they have taken advantage of all of their options,”
says Jones.
Because the human egg is large and contains a high percentage
of water, it is highly susceptible to freezer burn. Recent advances
in techniques for freezing eggs, however, have helped
overcome this challenge, resulting in dramatically improved success
rates. The procedure starts with hormone injections, which
increase the number of eggs a woman produces to about a dozen.
The eggs are then extracted, treated with a protectant and submerged
into a tank of liquid nitrogen. Years later, eggs can be
thawed and fertilized. The entire process lasts two weeks and
costs between USD 10,000 and 15,000. The procedure, first performed
in Italy in the mid-1980s, has resulted in more than 200
successful pregnancies in the last few years. In the past year,
eight babies have been born from frozen eggs at Extend Fertility
clinics, with world-leading egg survival rates of over 80%. In April
2007, a 36-year-old woman, who was enrolled in an Extend Fertility-sponsored
research study, made history by giving birth to
the first USA baby born from both a frozen egg and frozen sperm.
The increased number of women who choose to become mothers
later in life has spurred a tremendous growth in reproductive
health clinics in the USA and Europe. Currently Americans spend
over USD 1 billion a year on medical fertility procedures. The
number of fertility clinics in the USA has grown from 200 in the
mid-1990s to over 400 today. Extend Fertility alone has frozen
the eggs of over 200 women in the past three years, and the
number has doubled each year. The technology is still considered
investigational in the USA, and in general, the Food and Drug
Administration is putting tighter controls on fertility clinics. Jones
suggests future clients and investors in the fertility field be very
selective and choose clinics that invest in research and education,
that can show a record of a significant number of pregnancies
and that manufacture their product under current Good Manufacturing
Process guidelines.
While egg-freezing science is still new, it is promising and can
give women another chance to take control of their reproductive
health. “It’s our generation’s answer to the birth-control pill,” says
Jones. “Our moms had the birth-control pill, and that gave them
a lot of freedom, and the next generation will have egg freezing,
and that will give them freedom in a different way.” Tania Dimitrova
Source: American Society for Reproductive Medicine, A Guide for Patients, 2003, The National Vital Statistics Report, April 1999