Alumnus startup Genie Fertility has raised $1.2 million to take its non-invasive fertility test into new studies
A non-invasive test that can assess the health of a woman's uterus and inform fertility treatments is under development at Genie Fertility, a startup co-founded by Imperial alumnus Dr Andreas Hadjimitsis. The company made its debut last week with the announcement that it has raised $1.22 million (£908,000) in pre-seed funding from investors in Europe and the US.
"There is a huge lack of understanding and data when it comes to women's reproductive health, and that's partly down to the inaccessibility of the uterus," says Dr Hadjimitsis, Genie's chief technology officer.
At present, the only way to assess the lining of the uterus is to take a biopsy. This procedure is not only invasive and expensive, but ultimately not very accurate, because it only samples a small part of the lining.
Genie Fertility's approach is to test menstrual blood for a range of molecular markers for reproductive health, identified using a machine learning platform. Menstrual blood is the monthly shedding of the whole uterus lining, and rich in reproductive health data not present in a regular blood sample. However, it has not been used until now because of limited understanding and research surrounding menstrual blood, the company says, alongside a more general lack of research on women's health.
Fertility first
The company's first application of this approach is a fertility test, intended to support women undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF). It does this by reporting back on the health of the uterus so that doctors can take steps to maximise the chances of conception.
"IVF is the gold-standard treatment for infertility, which affects one in six couples, but it fails 73% of the time and requires urgent innovation," says Dr Hadjimitsis. "A lot of the focus in fertility has been on sperm, egg and embryo health. We want to create a world where the uterus gets the same attention."
Genie Fertility is developing the test in collaboration with leading IVF groups in the UK and Europe, with Dr Sylvain Ladame and Sotirios Saravelos from Imperial, Professor Hanno Steen from Harvard Medical School and Professor Eva Dimitriadis from the University of Melbourne acting as medical advisers. After a small pilot project, clinical studies began in March this year, with a number of patients already donating menstrual blood samples, and many returning multiple times.
The investment announced last week will fund a nine-month study to collect longitudinal data on pregnancy outcomes based on the markers identified in Genie's model. It will also support further work on the model itself, a machine learning system that identified useful predictive markers by studying data from over 200,000 fertility patients.
This platform has the potential to discover many more novel biomarkers, and the company plans to use it to develop further diagnostic tests and even therapeutics for reproductive health. Possible conditions include polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis and perimenopause.
Entrepreneurial bug
Dr Hadjimitsis did his PhD in Imperial's Department of Bioengineering, working on a novel way of 3D printing of biomaterials for use in diagnostic applications. "We thought a lot about what is needed to build diagnostic devices, and that has informed the first diagnostic we are developing at Genie," he says.
More importantly, he "caught the entrepreneurial bug" while at Imperial. He worked with CorNatural, a synthetic biology startup co-founded by Professor Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro from the Department of Bioengineering, and later advised a US venture capital fund interested on possible biotechnology investments. But ultimately he came back to the science.
"I realised that I wanted to help with the application of biology to areas of health where it is lacking," he says. This inspired him to sign up for Entrepreneurs First, an accelerator that puts together teams of founders around promising startup ideas.
Here he met his co-founder, Anoushka Menon, now the chief executive of Genie Fertility. She studied genetics at the University of Cambridge before pivoting to reproductive health, working first for home diagnostics company Thriva Health and then The Lowdown women's health platform.
At Entrepreneurs First they bonded over a shared experience of reproductive health issues and decided to combine their strengths to look for ways to help women to better reproductive health.
Access to trusted, experienced mentors can be transformative, especially in the early stages of building and growing a startup. Olivia Brown Enterprise Lab
Genie Fertility continues to be closely connected with Imperial, both through its advisors and the support provided by the Enterprise Lab's Venture Mentoring programme. "We have been matched with two mentors, and we meet once a month to discuss whatever is on our minds," says Dr Hadjimitsis, referring to Jenny Chong and Chris Thomas. "They have helped us with things like recruitment, regulation, designing the test and fundraising."
The programme recently collected a National Entrepreneurship Educators Award, recognising its exceptional contribution to enterprise education.
"Venture Mentoring is focused on what each team needs most at any given time," explains Olivia Brown, Incubation Services Manager in the Imperial Enterprise Lab. "We know that access to trusted, experienced mentors can be transformative, especially in the early stages of building and growing a startup." This approach has paid off, with the ventures involved raising over £192 million in investment to date.
