biotech
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Agricultural biotech startup Boost Biomes adds a strategic investor in Japan’s Universal Materials Incubator
Boost Biomes, the Y Combinator-backed developer of microbiome-based bio-fungicides and bio-pesticides for agricultural applications, has added $2 million in funding and picked up a new strategic investor in Japan’s Universal Materials Incubator.
To date, Boost Biomes has raised more than $7 million in financing to support the development of new products like its bio-fungicide developed from the microorganisms that live in the soil in a symbiotic relationship with plants.
The work that Boost does is primarily on understanding the interactions between microbes and plants in the soil. “The goal is to be the discovery engine and develop new microbial products for use in food and agriculture,” said Boost chief executive and co-founder Jamie Bacher.
The commitment from Japan’s Universal Materials Incubator expands on a $5 million institutional round led by another strategic partner, Yara International, a global crop nutrition company, and venture investors like Viking Global Investors and Y Combinator.
Boost hopes to tackle issues in agriculture like spoilage, bacterial contamination and pathogen infestations, as well as addressing diseases that can affect plant health directly.
Boost is already working with an undisclosed biomanufacturing partner to develop its bio-fungicide.
“UMI’s decision to invest in Boost comes from our evaluation of their team, technology, and the associated market opportunities. We believe that Boost’s platform generates a unique data set that can be exploited for far superior products with many diverse microbiome applications in food and agriculture,” said Yota Hayama, an investor at UMI, in a statement. “These are critical areas to achieve food security and promote sustainable agriculture. We also expect Boost’s huge potential on other areas where microbiomes are utilized.”
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Everlywell raises $175 million to expand virtual care options and scale its at-home health testing
Digital health startup Everlywell has raised a $175 million Series D funding round, following relatively fast on the heels of a $25 million Series C round it closed in February of this year. The Series D included a host of new investors, including BlackRock, The Chernin Group (TCG), Foresite Capital, Greenspring Associates, Morningside Ventures and Portfolio, along with existing investors including Highland Capital Partners, which led the Series C round. The startup has now raised more than $250 million to date.
Everlywell, which launched to the public at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 as a participant in Startup Battlefield, specializes in home healthcare, and specifically on home healthcare tests supported by their digital platform for providing customers with their results and helping them understand the diagnostics, and how to seek the right follow-on care and expert medical advice.
Earlier this year, Everlywell launched an at-home COVID-19 test collection kit — the first of this type of test to receive an emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its use that allowed cooperation with multiple lab service providers over time. The COVID-19 test kit joins its many other offerings, which include tests for thyroid hormone levels, food and allergen sensitivity, women’s health and fertility, vitamin D deficiency and more. I spoke to Everlywell CEO and founder Julia Cheek about the raise, and she acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic was definitely behind the decision to raise such a large amount so quickly again after the close of the Series C, since the company saw a sharp increase in demand coming out of the coronavirus crisis — not only for its COVID-19 test kit, but for at-home digital healthcare options in general.
“We obviously have a very successful COVID-19 test,” she said. “But we’ve also seen three-fourths of our test menu just explode at well over 100% year-over-year growth, and several of our tests are at 4x or 5x growth. That is really representative of this shift in consumer health behavior that will continue in a big way in many different verticals that include testing, and making things more convenient, digitally-enabled, and in the home.”
Like other companies built on solving for a shift to more remote and virtual care options, Cheek said that Everlywell had already anticipated this kind of consumer demand — but COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the pace of change, which is why the startup put together this round, at this size, this quickly (she says they started the process of putting together the Series D in September).
“We’ve been talking about the digital health movement, and the consumer-directed movement probably for a decade now,” she told me. “I do believe that this will be the watershed moment, unfortunately. But hopefully, we will come out on the other side of the pandemic and say, ‘There are some good things that happened broadly for healthcare.’ That is the hope of what we lean into everyday, and fundamentally, why we went out and raised this amount of capital in this tremendous growth year.”
Image Credits: Everlywell
Everlywell has also expanded availability of its products this year, with distribution in more than 10,000 retail locations across Target, Walgreens, CVS and Kroger stores across the U.S. The company also landed a number of new partnerships on the diagnostic lab and insurance payer side, as well as with major employers — a key customer group as employers shoulder the largest share of healthcare spending in the U.S. due to employee benefit plans. Cheek says that despite their commercial and enterprise customer wins, the focus remains squarely on consumer satisfaction, which is what distinguishes their offering.
“Our COVID-19 test is 75% new people buying our product, and it has an NPS [net promoter score] of 75,” she said. “And then it’s the most highly referred product, and also one of our top tests where people buy other tests. Experience matters here — we know that if someone is a promoter of Everlywell, if they rate us a nine or a 10, on NPS, they are five times more likely to purchase again on the platform.”
That’s not new for Everlywell, according to Cheek — customers have always had a high degree of satisfaction with the company’s products. But what is new is the expanded reach, and the realization among many Americans that virtual care and at-home options are available, and are effective.
“What you have is this lightbulb moment for Americans in a new way that care can be delivered where then they definitely don’t want to go back,” she said. “It’s not just for Everlywell. This is all of these verticals, that have really shifted consumer behavior around healthcare in the home, and I think that will be somewhat permanent. That is the main driver here, and is what we’re seeing, and it’s why Everlywell has resonated so well with so many Americans.”
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Next-gen skincare, silk without spiders and pollution for lunch: Meet the biotech startups pitching at IndieBio’s Demo Day
Biotech can often, and sometimes literally, fly over our heads. However, the pandemic has shown an increased need for investment and focus on solutions that work on human and planetary health. For IndieBio, a science and biotech accelerator run by VC firm SOSV, this unprecedented year offered high stakes and new challenges.
Today and tomorrow, the biotech accelerator is hosting its twice-annual demo day.
Starting in 2015, IndieBio has provided resources to founders solving complex challenges with biotech, from fake meat to sustainability. Over the years, the accelerator has created a portfolio of biotech companies valued at over $3.2 billion, including companies like Memphis Meats, which develops cultured meat from animal cells; NotCo, a plant-based food brand; and Catalog, which uses organisms for data storage.
As part of the accelerator, each participating company receives $250,000 in capital, numerous other services and access to lab space. In July, the founder and head of IndieBio, Arvind Gupta, left his position to pursue a role at Mayfield. While Gupta remains an adviser, Po Bronson took the role as the new managing director.
Bronson was immediately put to the test. This year, the program expanded from operating solely in San Francisco to also create a cohort based in New York. It also doubled the amount of companies it invested in, bringing this cohort to 20 companies.
As you can imagine, lockdowns ultimately forced founders to delay key lab work in the beginning of the pandemic. Eventually, founders were able to partner with universities, contract research organizations or other biotech accelerators to begin their research, says Julie Wolf, the head of investor relations at SOSV. The NYC class received a “golden ticket” for free lab space come November.
And these dynamics make this cohort all the more fascinating to dive into.
Watch the New York Stream here, which will happen on Tuesday October 27 from 1:00-3:00pm ET.
Watch the San Francisco stream here, which will happen on Wednesday October 28 from 10:00-12:00pm PT.
For those who can’t tune in, here’s a list of all the companies presenting in New York and San Francisco over the next two days.
San Francisco cohort
Reazent: Founded by Sumit Verma, Reazent has discovered and patented a way to manipulate soil bacteria into triggering crops to grow more. It works with 116 strains, from kale to potatoes, and wants to dig into the market of organic agricultural land.
Image Credits: Witthaya Prasongsin / Getty Images
Kraken Sense: Founded by Nisha Sarveswaran, Kraken Sense has created an in-line autonomous device to measure the concentration of pathogens in large-scale food and water systems. The product can be deployed in farms and kitchens and uses refillable single-use cartridges.
Advanced Microbubbles: The startup, led by Jameel Feshitan, has created a platform that helps practitioners deliver drugs to complex and difficult tumors. The company collaborated with NIH NIDA and uses proprietary bubbles to deliver chemotherapeutics. Currently, Microbubbles is working to solve two types of cancers: neuroblastoma and pancreatic cancer.
Cybele Microbiome: CEO Nicole Scott has created a direct-to-consumer skincare line with a focus on prebiotics. The line uses ingredients that work in tandem with the skin microbiome, even triggering it to express natural scents.
Ivy Natal: Ivy Natal is developing a process to harvest healthy human egg cells from skin cells. CEO Colin Bortner is working on a treatment for infertility and plans to enable families to have genetic children who can’t otherwise with current solutions.
Microgenesis: Led by Gabriela Gutierrez, Microgenesis has created a proprietary test and nutraceutical regiment (including probiotics) to help women who struggle with infertility get pregnant. The company worked with a cohort of 287 mothers, and with its product over 75% of patients became pregnant.
Image Credits: Westend61 / Getty Images
AsimicA: Led by Nikolai Mushnikov, Asmicia has created a new way to bring stem cells to microbes. The company could lengthen and grow the yields of bio-manufacturing, and is currently working to select the right fermentation partner.
Liberum: CEO Aidan Tinafar is working to disrupt what they think could be a $400 billion market opportunity: recombinant proteins. Liberum has created a protein printer that could cut down the creation of custom recombinant proteins from weeks to a few hours.
Khepra: Led by Julie Kring, Khepra is leveraging fuel production as a way to store extra renewable energy. The company is building a series of reactors that could take your old plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, extract chemicals and fuels, and sell that fuel to refineries.
Carbix: Carbix, led by Quincy Sammy, takes enriched CO2 and converts it into raw material that can then be repurposed into industrial products.
Spintex: CEO Alex Greenhalgh is creating a new, scalable way of making silk. The company mimics spider spinning and uses a natural protein, with an end product that they see as better than premium silk.
New York cohort
Biomage: CEO Adam Kurkiewicz wants to make single-cell sequencing data more accessible for research biologistics. The technology could help scientists explore human cells to enhance medicine and drug discovery.
Diptera.ai: Vic Levitin is creating a scalable, affordable and sustainable way to fight mosquitoes and their diseases.
Cayuga Biotech: Damien Kudela, CEO of Cayuga Biotech, has created a drug that could induce clots and stop severe bleeding situations.
Brightcure: Chiara Heide, CEO of Brightcure, has created a bioactive cream that uses natural bacterium to restore a woman’s natural microbiome.
Multus Media: CEO Cai Linton is producing an ingredient that hopes to make cultivated meat production affordable and accessible.
Image Credits: Getty Images
BioFeyn: The company uses nanotechnologies based on human medicine to deliver nutrients and disease prevention to fish. CEO Timothy Bouley is working to make eating healthy fish a sustainable practice.
Halomine: Ted Eveleth, CEO, wants to turn every surface into an antimicrobial surface. Halomine’s product, Halofilm, can be used in tandem with any household bleach cleaner to enhance disinfection techniques.
Allied Microbiota: Lauralynn Kourtz, CEO of Allied Microbiota, wants to use natural microbes to eliminate toxic waste. The company uses bacteria to clean contaminated soils.
Scindo: Scindo, led by Gustaf Hemberg, uses enzymes to make plastic biodegradable.
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4 sustainable industries where founders and VCs can see green by going green
Now’s the time for sustainable investments to shine. There are billions of dollars in funding in both public and private markets dedicated to new sustainable investing and demand for consumers for a more conscious capitalism has never been stronger.
As founders and investors reawaken to a sustainable morning in America a few areas are going to demand hardware, software and business model innovations.
Some of these sectors have been on the investment radar for the past year or two and others are just beginning to capture investor attention, but they all have something in common: the investor appetite for new businesses addressing the food supply chain; energy management and construction for homes and offices; carbon sequestration and monitoring and management of offsets; and new biomaterials and processes for packaging and industrial chemicals replacements have never been stronger.
If we’re going to feed the world, let’s start with the food chain.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has exposed significant holes in the food supply. Companies like AppHarvest, which agreed to go public through a SPAC earlier this year are only one of several companies remaking agriculture through the application of technology. There’s also Plenty, Bowery Farms, Unfold, BrightFarms and Revol Greens, working to upend the agricultural supply chain. If those companies are looking at new ways of growing crops, companies like Apeel Sciences and Hazel Technologies are trying to find ways to preserve food from spoilage. Treasure8 is looking at ways to use food waste for new food and ingredients and they’re not alone.
Then there’s the protein replacement companies that we’ve written about previously. Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat, Nuggs, Future Meat Technologies, Shiok Meats (a seafood company) are devising methods to create meaty proteins less dependent on animal husbandry. Perfect Day and its competitors are doing the same for the dairy industry.
There’s also tremendous need for new protein sources to feed the animals that people around the world still like to eat. For this there’re companies like Ynsect, which is providing insect proteins for industrial fish farms, or Grubly Farms, which is providing feed to the families raising their own chickens.
For these opportunities that are raising hundreds of millions in financing there are others that require the kind of high margin software solutions that are yet to be developed. These are visual technologies for tracking, monitoring and managing food production; sensors for improving the storage and supply chain, software for managing production and tracking produce and products from the farm to the table. Venture investors are beginning to invest in these companies as well.
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Extra Crunch Live: Join Anu Duggal for a live Q&A on August 20 at 11am PT/2pm ET
Rent the Runway and Glossier became unicorns within the same week in June 2019. That same year, only 2.7% of venture capital dollars went toward female-founded companies.
Silicon Valley’s disconnect between the monetary success of female-founded companies and funding them in the first place is disheartening. The conversation is there, but the dollar sign momentum remains missing.
Anu Duggal founded the Female Founders Fund before both were even a tangible reality. In 2014, the entrepreneur launched her first fund to invest in female-led startups. It took her 700 meetings over two years to make that first close, she said. Years later, venture capital has slightly taken note. But the Female Founders Fund, or “F Cubed,” has tracked female-led wins and bet big on the underestimated asset class.
Her early focus on female founders hasn’t evolved, but the landscape has. And in an unprecedented world of remote deals and democratization of venture capital, we’re even more excited to have Duggal join us on Extra Crunch Live this upcoming Thursday at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. EST/6 p.m. GMT
Those tuning in and taking notes are encouraged to ask questions, but you have to be an Extra Crunch member to access the chat. If you still haven’t signed up, now’s your chance! With the subscription, you’ll also be able to check out all of our stellar previous guests on-demand (watch those episodes here).
Female Founders Fund has provided seed institutional capital to entrepreneurs with over $3 billion in enterprise value. The firm has cut checks into women-led companies such as Rent the Runway, Billie, Tala, Peanut, Thrive Global and Zola. The fund has also attracted limited partners like Melinda Gates and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani.
Duggal herself has a fascinating trajectory into technology investing. At 25, she started a wine bar in Bombay called The Tasting Room. She went on to get an MBA from London Business School, and co-founded Exclusively.in, an e-commerce company that got acquired by Indian fashion e-commerce company Myntra in 2011.
Hear from Duggal on August 20 about how the investment landscape has changed for female founders, what she thinks of as a success story and if 2020 feels different than 2014. And Extra Crunch fam, make sure to bring your thoughtful questions for me to ask her live on air.
You can find the full details of the conversation below the jump.
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Mission Bio raises $70 million to help scale its tech for improving the development of targeted cancer therapies
California-based startup Mission Bio has raised a new $70 million Series C funding round, led by Novo Growth and including participation from Soleus Capital and existing investors Mayfield, Cota and Agilent. Mission Bio will use the funding to scale its Tapestri Platform, which uses the company’s work in single-cell multi-omics technology to help optimize clinical trials for targeted, precision cancer therapies.
Mission Bio’s single-cell multi-omics platform is unique in the therapeutic industry. What it allows is the ability to zero in on a single cell, observing both genotype (fully genetic) and phenotype (observable traits influenced by genetics and other factors) impact resulting from use of various therapies during clinical trials. Mission’s Tapestri can detect both DNA and protein changes within the same single cell, which is key in determining effectiveness of targeted therapies because it can help rule out the effect of other factors not under control when analyzing in bulk (i.e. across groups of cells).
Founded in 2012 as a spin-out of research work conducted at UCSF, Mission Bio has raised a total of $120 million to date. The company’s tech has been used by a number of large pharmaceutical and therapeutic companies, including Agios, LabCorp and Onconova Therapeutics, as well as at cancer research centers including UCSF, Stanford and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
In addition to helping with the optimization of clinical trials for treatments of blood cancers and tumors, Mission’s tech can be used to validate genome editing — a large potential market that could see a lot of growth over the next few years with the rise of CRISPR-based therapeutic applications.
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IoT and data science will boost foodtech in the post-pandemic era
Sunny Dhillon is an early-stage investor at Signia Ventures in San Francisco where he invests in retail tech, e-commerce infrastructure and logistics, alongside consumer and enterprise software startups.
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Even as e-grocery usage has skyrocketed in our coronavirus-catalyzed world, brick-and-mortar grocery stores have soldiered on. While strict in-store safety guidelines may gradually ease up, the shopping experience will still be low-touch and socially distanced for the foreseeable future.
This begs the question: With even greater challenges than pre-pandemic, how can grocers ensure their stores continue to operate profitably?
Just as micro-fulfillment centers (MFCs), dark stores and other fulfillment solutions have been helping e-grocers optimize profitability, a variety of old and new technologies can help brick-and-mortar stores remain relevant and continue churning out cash.
Today, we present three “must-dos” for post-pandemic retail grocers: rely on the data, rely on the biology and rely on the hardware.
Rely on the data
Image Credits: Pixabay/Pexels (opens in a new window)
The hallmark of shopping in a store is the consistent availability and wide selection of fresh items — often more so than online. But as the number of in-store customers continues to fluctuate, planning inventory and minimizing waste has become ever more so a challenge for grocery store managers. Grocers on average throw out more than 12% of their on-shelf produce, which eats into already razor-thin margins.
While e-grocers are automating and optimizing their fulfillment operations, brick-and-mortar grocers can automate and optimize their inventory planning mechanisms. To do this, they must leverage their existing troves of customer, business and external data to glean valuable insights for store managers.
Eden Technologies of Walmart is a pioneering example. Spun out of a company hackathon project, the internal tool has been deployed at over 43 distribution centers nationwide and promises to save Walmart over $2 billion in the coming years. For instance, if a batch of produce intended for a store hundreds of miles away is deemed soon-to-ripen, the tool can help divert it to the nearest store instead, using FDA standards and over 1 million images to drive its analysis.
Similarly, ventures such as Afresh Technologies and Shelf Engine have built platforms to leverage years of historical customer and sales data, as well as seasonality and other external factors, to help store managers determine how much to order and when. The results have been nothing but positive — Shelf Engine customers have increased gross margins by over 25% and Afresh customers have reduced food waste by up to 45%.
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Paige, the computational pathology startup targeting cancer, closes a Series B at $70M
Paige, the startup that spun out of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and launched in 2018 to help advance cancer research and care by applying AI to better understand cancer pathology, is today announcing a milestone in its growth story: it has raised a further $20 million from Goldman Sachs and Healthcare Venture Partners, closing out its Series B at $70 million.
Leo Grady, Paige’s CEO, says the funding will go toward several areas.
It will be used for hiring; to continue expanding its partnerships with biopharmaceutical companies (deals that have not yet been made public); and to continue investing in clinical work, based around algorithms it has built and trained using more than 25 million pathology slides in MSK’s archive, plus IP related to the AI-based computational pathology that underpins Paige’s work. It will also be used to help it expand to the U.K. and Europe. Paige has a CE mark to be used clinically in both regions and the startup already has beta sites in the U.K. and EU, but it hasn’t had a fully commercial launch in either region, Grady said.
Paige — which has now raised more than $95 million with other investors, including Breyer Capital, MSK and Kenan Turnacioglu — is keeping quiet about its valuation. But for some context, we noted that it was around $208 million when the first tranche of the round was announced — $45 million in December 2019, with a further $5 million in April. It attracted this latest $20 million in part because business has been strong, Grady noted. As a result, despite it being a generally tough climate for raising money right now, Paige didn’t face those challenges.
“The climate in which Goldman made its initial investment” — the $5 million round in April — “was when COVID-19 had hit hard and they were realising the magnitude,” Grady said. “They wanted to see how things played out for Paige in the economy. But the way it has been going has been encouraging.”
Indeed, a lot of attention these days is focused around the current public health crisis making its way around the world in the form of COVID-19, and the knock-on effects that it is having across the economy and socially. Paige’s growth in that context has been interesting.
We’re still in the early stages of understanding COVID-19 and how it interacts with other conditions (such as cancer) — and it’s not an area that Paige is directly exploring in its work. But in the meantime, its platform — based around digitised slides — has come into its own for clinicians and others who can no longer regularly physically visit laboratories.
Paige’s enterprise imaging system — the company was co-founded by Dr Thomas Fuchs, known as the “father of computational pathology” and is the director of Computational Pathology in The Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, as well as a professor of machine learning at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences; and Dr David Klimstra, chairman of the department of pathology at MSK — allows users to view digital slides remotely, and while all hardware manufacturers today have digital viewers, these are proprietary, tied to those scanners and “not built for high performance,” Grady noted.
Paige’s platform allows its users not only to share research and primary data without physically sending slides around, but to use high performance software built to “read” the data in a more comprehensive way than clinicians and researchers would otherwise be able to do. That initially has been applied to work in prostrate and breast cancers but is now also being explored around other cancers as well, Grady said. “We’re adding in information to the workflow, boosting the confidence and quality of data. The first piece [the platform and the slides] enables the second piece.”
The Goldman Sachs investment is coming from the financial services giant’s merchant banking division, and as part of it, David Castelblanco, MD at Goldman Sachs, has joined Paige’s board of directors.
“We have been very impressed with the company and its pace of development,” he said in a statement. “We are excited to increase our commitment to support Leo, Thomas and the Paige team’s transformative work with artificial intelligence and machine learning in the cancer field.”
“We initially invested in Paige recognizing the potential of their products to add significant value to the industry and impact the future of cancer care,” added Jeffrey C. Lightcap, senior managing director of Healthcare Venture Partners. “After seeing Paige make tremendous progress in such a short period, we added to our investment to further accelerate their growth.”
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Pioneering CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna is coming to Disrupt
Jennifer Doudna, a woman whose work has triggered the explosion in innovation in the field of synthetic biology and has given researchers around the world a way to program and reprogram the living world, will be speaking at Disrupt in September.
From her positions as the Chancellor’s Chair Professor in the University of California, Berkeley’s Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology Departments and a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Doudna has been at the forefront of research into CRISPR gene editing technology.
It was only eight years ago that Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier first proposed that CRISPR-Cas9 enzymes (which direct immune responses in microbes) could be used to edit genomes. That discovery would prove to be one of the most significant advancements in the history of the human understanding of biology, and it has the potential to reshape the world.
Doudna describes her own journey into the field of biochemistry beginning back in Hawaii with the discovery of James Watson’s book “The Double Helix” on her father’s bookshelf. From an early age growing up in Hawaii as the daughter of a literature professor, Doudna knew she wanted to pursue a career in science. But it was Watson’s famous book that opened her eyes to the human side of science.
Now her scientific research and startup endeavors have the potential to open humanity’s eyes to the potential benefits of this revolutionary field of science. Because in addition to her research work, Doudna is also a co-founder of a number of companies including: Mammoth Biosciences, Caribou Biosciences, Intellia Therapeutics and Editas Medicine.
These companies are tackling some of the biggest challenges that the world faces. Mammoth is working on a new type of COVID-19 test, Caribou is pursuing novel cancer therapies, and publicly traded Editas is pursuing treatments for ocular, neurodegenerative, and blood diseases as well as cancer therapies.
There’s almost no industry where gene editing hasn’t had some sort of effect. From material science to food science and agriculture to medicine, CRISPR technology is creating opportunities to remake entire industries.
Genetically modified organisms are already making Impossible Foods meat replacements taste meaty; they’re used in Solugen’s bio-based chemicals; and CRISPR edited cells have been proven safe in early trials to treat certain kinds of cancer.
Given the breadth of applications and the questions that the technology’s application raises about how and what limitations researchers should put on the technology, there will be plenty for Doudna to discuss on the Disrupt stage, including but certainly not limited to her recently announced work on making college campuses safer via a fast saliva-based COVID-19 test.
Disrupt is all virtual in 2020 and runs September 14 to September 18, and we have several Digital Pass options to be part of the action or to exhibit virtually, which you can check out here.
Doudna joins an incredible line-up of Disrupt speakers including Sequoia’s Roelof Botha and Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. We’ll be announcing even more speakers over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
(Editor’s Note: We’re watching the developing situation around the novel coronavirus very closely and will adapt as we go. You can find out the latest on our event schedule plans here.)
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Demand for fertility services persists despite COVID-19 shutdowns
In 2019, the global fertility services industry was estimated to be worth $14.8 billion with demand driven by the significant growth in the median age of first-time mothers, according to a Research & Markets report.
Gina Bartasi, founder and CEO of NYC-based fertility center Kindbody, has pointed to macroeconomic trends responsible for the industry’s consistent growth, such as the increase in single mothers by choice and the fact that “heterosexual couples are waiting to have children and waiting to get married, and more and more same-sex couples are having children, which is relatively new.”
Regardless of the increasing demand, disasters can disrupt fertility services: On March 17, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine directed U.S.-based fertility clinics to avoid initiating new treatments, push back nonemergency surgeries and shift care to telemedicine.
Now reopened, it’s undeniable that COVID-19’s national impact could alter the space as different types of crises have in the past. In looking back, we can find a better understanding of what the future holds.
After the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, a University of Louisville study found that there was “a prompt and significant increase in births and birthrates in the post-9/11 period” in New York City. Relatedly, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005 and created the nation’s costliest natural disaster, it was also one of five times since 1987 that frozen embryos were evacuated and protected during a natural disaster.
According to a study done by University of Wisconsin, “following Katrina, displacement contributed to a 30% decline in birth cohort size. Black fertility fell, and remained 4% below expected values through 2010. By contrast, white fertility increased by 5%.” The communities were so ravaged that the area’s Black population has remained substantially smaller.
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