This Startup Wants To Give Women More Eggs

Ovelle Bio’s quest to turn back the clock on female fertility

Women are born with every egg they’ll ever have. Roughly one to two million. The number only goes down as they age. By puberty, 70% are gone. By age 37, about 25,000 remain, and a growing share of those carry chromosomal abnormalities that can’t make viable embryos.

Every decision a woman makes about when to have children is made against this clock. The clock does not pause for careers, for bad timing, for partners who aren’t ready, for cancer treatment at 30.

It’s a bottleneck that never made sense to synthetic biologist Merrick Pierson Smela. With the help of modern tools of genetics, we’ve managed to turn skin into stem cells and edit human genomes to cure diseases. Why shouldn’t it be possible to help women make new eggs?

Human ovarian tissue cultured for two weeks using Ovelle’s protocols (left is baseline, right is after follicle activation)

Last year, he founded Ovelle Bio in Boston, to manufacture human eggs from stem cells. The process is called in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG. If it works, the clock stops. Eggs become renewable. And the most fundamental constraint on female fertility disappears.

To do it, they have their eyes set on beating nature at its own game. “Our approach results in a method that’s faster and more efficient than natural biology,” Smela shares.