Gurjeet Singh, CEO of Oma Fertility, joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss how they are using artificial intelligence to improve IVF outcomes and reduce costs.

Cheddar Innovates

How Oma Fertility Uses A.I. to Improve IVF Outcomes

Welcome back to Cheddar innovates brought to you by curiosity stream the success of IVF. IVF has been stagnant for the better part of a decade And the price tag for this type of treatment can be anywhere from around $30,000 for a single cycle. Our next guest is using the latest artificial intelligence technology to improve IVF outcomes and importantly reduce costs. Joining us now is Gorge it Singh ceo of oma fertility, glad to have you on this morning. How does Oma actually use aI to improve IVF outcomes? Good morning Alicia, thank you so much for having me. So we have developed an AI based technology that we call Omar's form inside which has embryologists select the best sperm cell to fertilize each egg while they're doing the fertilization process in real time. The the arm away is all about this human centered care as we understand it. How do you ensure this for your patient? So today, if you talk to people who have gone through IVF, even people who have been successful with IVF, they often feel frustrated. They feel like they had no control, they feel like they were not educated, they did not know what was going to happen. And so from our perspective we want to offer human centered care where we educate the families who are going through the procedure with us, we ensure they have the right information, we pair them with a care advocate who works with them throughout their journey. And we also plan on offering things like psychological support as folks are going through the treatment with us, which can be very emotional training. It certainly seems like a well cycled kind of approach to this given that it's not just a straightforward medical position uh procedure. It's really something that has, you know, strong emotional and mental tolls on top of kind of the care that that's needed in terms of price. Because when we talk about IVF, typically the association is just the high sticker price for something like this. How can this reduce costs and make IVF treatments more accessible? So IVF, as you mentioned, typically across the US costs about $25,000 a cycle and typically families go through three cycles before either succeeding or giving up. Which means that the average customer today is looking at spending about $75,000 to maybe have a child. And we on the other hand, we basically want to pass on the savings from our better technology onto our consumers. So as an oma cycle basically only cost $7500 at our clinic as opposed to $25,000 per cycle elsewhere. And that's possible because of our technology. You said $7500. That's a that's a drastic difference. Um in terms of understanding the IVF procedure or treatment through OMA versus traditional IVF treatment. What's the comparison? Yeah. So when you're typically thinking at IVF, you know, it's a very manual process and embryologists hunched over a microscope looks at eggs and sperm says and makes decisions on whether to utilize this form, sell for that egg and then incubate embryos and so on. So it's a highly highly manual procedure. And if you focus just on the sperm cell part of the equation which is where we have focused in a typical healthy male sperm sample. There are 100 million sperm cells And only 4% of those firms that are actually helping. So our ai methodology, healthy embryologists select the best form cell for matching each egg. And this is a huge advance an idea which as you mentioned has really not changed in the past three decades. Yeah, I mean huge huge advance in the technology. But also again to your point earlier the accessibility and affordability for for so many people potentially um homo fertility has over $37 million dollars in funding. What are investors seeing in this space in terms of the opportunity proposal that you're presenting. Yeah. So if you look at the statistics in the US only 2.1% of all birds happened near IVF compared to a country like Denmark where almost 10% of birds happened with IVF. So anyway, you cut it. The US market is underserved by 4-5 x. We see about 90,000 birds a year from IVF in the us while the number should be closer to half a million birds a year. The IVF if we were similar to other countries, other advanced nations. So that's really the opportunity we want to expand the market by bringing the fruits of our technology to bear. Just thinking a bit more broadly for a moment. What kind of role do you think Ai is going to play in the future of personalized medicine across other spaces in the medicine industry? So I believe AI is going to change everything. We are seeing AI being applied all the way from basic drug discovery from using deep learning and things like Alpha fall to design the best drugs to match for you know different parts of the body and different signaling pathways all the way to patient care by developing protocols for better surgeries as an example to form a fertility obviously where we're using AI for better outcomes in IVF. I believe every facet of health care is going to be completely changed by Ai and we're going to see a future where the scientific part of medicine and the empathetic part of medicine are going to be two equally important things where empathy basically has not played a role in medicine thus far. And I think AI will bring about that revolution in medicine really quickly before before I have to let you go here what's in store for the future of Oma fertility. So we are building four more clinics across the U. S. As we speak, ones in ST louis was in Atlanta ones in new york and one's in L. A. We are also planning to build more robotic devices. We see a future where we have completely into an automated embryology product where gang let's go in and healthy embryos come out. So that's what we see in the future, more clinics and better technology. Both two great things for the company and for a lot of women out there, really appreciate your time and your insight. Surjit Singh ceo of OMA fertility.