Christy Prada, CEO of Future Fertility. Using the firm’s software, Ms. Prada said patients can better understand their chances of having a baby and the role the quality of their eggs may play in attempts that fail.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
The science behind making a baby becomes more precise every year thanks to fertilization specialists rapidly adopting emerging technologies – and artificial intelligence is no exception.
A slew of global tech companies is competing to develop AI tools that can advance the fertility industry’s standard of care, for example, or recognize patterns that would otherwise go undetected by the naked eye.
Among them is Toronto-based Future Fertility, which has trained a machine learning model to assess the quality of eggs extracted for freezing and in vitro fertilization (IVF). Using the firm’s software, chief executive officer Christy Prada said patients can better understand their chances of having a baby and the role the quality of their eggs may play in attempts that fail.
Innovation is happening at a rapid pace in the fertility industry, especially considering the relative newness of fields such as IVF, said Carolynn Dubé, executive director of Fertility Matters Canada.
“The practice of the medicine itself is really new in the global scheme of things. And, at the same time, we’re talking about one of the most important aspects of many people’s lives: having a baby,” she said, adding that the first IVF baby is only 47 years old.
Since 2010, Canada’s fertility rate has dropped by 15 per cent, a 2023 report by Fertility Matters states. This means one in six Canadian adults struggle with fertility at some point in their lives.
Yet, fertility treatment within Canada remains out of reach for many people who need it. The cost of IVF can range from $10,000 to $20,000 a cycle, and it’s not uncommon for patients to require more than once cycle. Egg-freezing procedures commonly cost between $7,000 to $10,000, and that’s before additional costs for egg storage or IVF are tacked on.
It’s those repeated cycles and the emotional, physical and financial strain that accompanies them that make Ms. Dubé hopeful for the use of AI in fertility care. “Any way we can reduce the time and cost to someone taking home a baby is the ultimate goal.”
Ms. Prada shows microscopic images of eggs at Future Fertility's Toronto office on Feb. 18. The firm has trained an AI tool to image and establish a standard of care for eggs.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
The egg has long been the only input in fertility treatments that lacked a standard of care, Ms. Prada said. Clinics had ways to measure patients’ sperm quality, hormone levels and embryo grades, for example, but not egg quality.
Instead, patients going through egg retrieval would be told their likelihood of success based upon egg calculators, which use a patient’s age and number of mature eggs to provide an expectation of live birth.
“That was a huge gap. And what that meant for patients is when you go through an egg retrieval, you leave the clinic with basically a Visa bill and a number, right? Okay, you’ve got 10 mature eggs. That’s really all you know,” Ms. Prada said.
Now, patients who go to clinics that use Future Fertility’s tools can receive a detailed report showing them images of each of their eggs after collection and the likelihood of each one becoming a blastocyst, which is an embryo that can be transferred.
To train Future Fertility’s machine learning models – Violet applies to egg freezing and Magenta applies to IVF – the firm used a proprietary data set of egg images and the reproductive outcome of each one, built through scientific partnerships with clinics in more than 12 countries. Each image came with the age of the patient, but no other identifying information.
Once Future Fertility’s technology has been integrated with a lab’s existing equipment – at no cost – Ms. Prada said her company charges a fee per report. Depending on how the clinic decides to implement the AI, that fee could be passed along to the patient or absorbed largely by the business and implemented as a new standard of care.
The cost varies based upon which tool a clinic is using and how it implements that tool. But Ms. Prada said the cost range for a patient in Canada to employ the AI for an IVF cycle, for example, would be $400 to $500.
At the Ottawa Fertility Centre, lab director Samantha Torrance said it is implementing Future Fertility’s tools only by patient request – for now. “Some want it because they really value more information and want as much as they can get.”
“But we tend to be pretty evidence-based at the centre and so, until we’ve had really good adoption by all of our clinicians who believe that this makes sense to do in every single patient, we don’t apply it as a standard of care,” she said.
In Vancouver, Olive Fertility Centre has taken a different approach and folded the cost of using Future Fertility’s Violet tool into its standard fees. Gary Nakhuda, co-founder and co-director of Olive, said patients seem to appreciate the extra data and images of their eggs.
“Prior to that it was like, ‘Okay, those are your eggs. And, fingers crossed, come back when you’re ready,‘ ” he said.
Assessing egg quality isn’t the only way technology is helping transform the fertility industry.
Jenna Gale, a fertility specialist at the Ottawa Fertility Centre, said her clinic is currently running trials of software to help triage patients, which saves care providers time and gets patients seen faster based upon their needs. Dr. Nakhuda said his clinic is looking into something similar.
Robotics is another exciting development in the field that Dr. Nakhuda is watching. Often thought of as a “laboratory in a box,” he said there’s talk of several companies developing robots that can automate tasks such as fertilizing eggs or culturing embryos.
Next on Future Fertility’s to-do list is continuing to develop several other solutions, including an egg banking product and an endometrium receptivity tool, which analyzes ultrasounds taken on the day of an embryo transfer to help with related decisions. With continued expansion on the horizon, Ms. Prada said she expects the company will become profitable in less than five years.
“Our goal is to shift from being a one-trick pony of just looking at the egg to looking at different use cases for the egg, different business models for the egg, and then how else we can deploy technology, and AI specifically, in the lab and in a clinical setting,” Ms. Prada said.
Michael Hartman, medical director at Generation Fertility in Vaughan, Ont., said while he expects competition will continue to accelerate the use of advanced technologies within the industry, it’s critical that the needs of patients continue to come first.
“It’s important to be responsible with the use of any of these innovations, to make sure that if you’re introducing it – and especially if you’re going to charge people for it – that there really is a good reason to think it would benefit them.”