How we are turning fertility care on its head, starting with IVF.

Before I met Nader, the only thing I knew about IVF was the headline: a technique to fertilise an egg with a sperm outside the female body.

But then he told me about his story, similar to hundreds of thousands of people each year going through IVF in the UK: cycle after cycle, over many years of expensive and draining treatments, within an opaque and broken system of fertility care.

Ok, that got my attention.

As I spent more time learning about Assisted Reproductive Technologies, it became obvious to me how immense the opportunity ahead of us was: not only is there an obvious need to improve the experience of IVF for those struggling with infertility, but fertility care should be made accessible to everyone, before it even becomes a challenge. Doing so could drive a social revolution, liberating women in particular in completely new ways.

Infertility is a taboo topic.

Infertility affects 1 out of 5 couples, and still, we don’t openly talk about it.

However, it is often mentioned in day to day life. Think about it!
Every TV show you can name has someone diagnosed with infertility — Monica and Chandler in Friends, Charlotte in Sex & the City, Meredith in Greys Anatomy, Robin in How I Met Your Mother… And everyone has friends, or family members, that “have been trying for a while”.

Still, no one truly talks about it, about that grueling nature of the process.

No one opens up and tells you how it takes cycle after cycle, over years and years. No one points out the fact that you have to inject yourself with hormones several times per day. No one draws attention to how very low the chances are. No one tells you the majority of patients get depressed and about all the problems it can create in a couple. And no one stresses how very expensive it is and a luxury for the few.

Setting expectations is paramount.

You’ve probably heard of this hack, now widely used in airports to improve satisfaction at security checkpoints. They started applying the most complex models, reengineering flows, to end up reducing waiting times by a minute or two, but that didn’t really make a difference for travellers. The most impactful solution they implemented that dramatically improved satisfaction rates, was to simply display the remaining waiting time every 10 meters…

While the spontaneity of good experiences brings a lot of beauty and romanticism to life, when it comes to the most difficult ones, setting expectations is paramount. It gives people more control and it helps them plan for the worst case scenarios.

As an operator, I have to make quick key decisions everyday, and the most important questions I ask myself when I am uneasy are : “What is the worst that could happen?” and “How do I minimise negative outcomes?” It is this same principle we are applying to help patients struggling with infertility.

We help you plan for your fertility care journey.

When you decide to turn to IVF, the only option available today is to give a £8,000 “try” at a first cycle, with less than 30% chance to have a baby at the end of it. If it fails, you then have to repeat this gamble again and again, finding yourself, years down the line, exhausted, penniless and potentially unsuccessful. This is unfair.

Our purpose at Gaia is to help patients plan for their IVF treatment both financially and emotionally. We don’t do it in a broad brush stroke for the ‘average’ person, but in a very personalised way. By analysing data from over 1 million treatments in the past 35 years, we make robust predictions about patients’ personal chances of success, their optimal treatment path, and reimburse most of the cost in case of a negative outcome. It’s simply a no brainer.

This goes beyond IVF.

What if down the line, we could use this data to tackle our fertility much earlier in our lifetime and prevent infertility all together ?

Ask anyone before their thirties whether they plan to have a family in the future, the vast majority will say yes. And yet, we will wait until we have found the perfect partner, announced it to the world, secured a good financial situation… Basically be ready to have a baby now, before questioning our fertility by just “trying”.

But at the same time, we constantly — and oftentimes unconsciously — make life decisions with our fertility timeline in mind: “settling” for a partner, refusing a career opportunity across the globe or investing our money in a house rather than in ourselves. Because it might become too late, too hard to have a family at a later time.

This makes no sense to me.

Deconstructing social deadlines.

I have always asked myself why we are so afraid of growing up, and never truly celebrate the years as they pass. There seems to be a general downhill mood after 25. But how come more income, more independence, and more experience can feel so daunting?

A part of the answer is, in my opinion, linked with our fear of infertility, or more precisely the lack of clarity around it. It is particularly exacerbated for women because time is biologically of the essence.

What if we could prevent this, simply by giving wider access to fertility care earlier in life? To identify and prevent issues, to provide clarity and context on timing and options (think egg, sperm, and embryo freezing). Simply giving you the tools to better plan for the project of a lifetime: building a family.

I believe that by better understanding what is ahead, we can live our life more like a continuum rather than a succession of socially constructed deadlines.

We’re constantly looking for outstanding people to join our “family” so if any of this resonates with you, if you want to be part of an ambitious team and project, ping me at ines@gaia.family, I will come back to you.