Monday, October 10, 2011

Startup OvaScience to 'energize' egg cells to improve fertility

By Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent

Article updated as of 9:02 a.m., Oct. 11, 2011.


OvaScience, a reproductive medicine startup that has been running quietly out of the Prudential Center since January, will talk about the science behind its technique to improve the success rate of in vitro fertilization (IVF) at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting on Oct. 19 in Orlando, Fla.

At the conference, co-founder and Scientific Advisory Board Chairman Jonathan L. Tilly will talk about the science that can help older women who have failed at a couple IVF procedures to get pregnant. Tilly also is chief of research for the MGH Vincent Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and professor at Harvard Medical School.

“The company began in January of this year with the idea of in-licensing two technologies, one from Mass General Hospital and one from Harvard Medical School,” said Scott Chappel, chief scientific officer of OvaScience, who was previously with Serono and Dyax. One technology is from Tilly, who a number of years ago identified a precursor to oocytes (egg cells) in the ovary that can be used to “energize” older egg cells and boost the egg’s ability to fertilize and to mature into a healthy embryo. The second is from another co-founder, David Sinclair, a researcher in the genetics department of Harvard Medical School who studies aging and the function of mitochondria, which provide the energy a cell needs to function and divide.

Other co-founders are Michelle Dipp, the company’s CEO and also a co-founder of Boston venture capital company Longwood Founders Fund, and Dipp’s Longwood partners Christoph Westphal and Rich Aldrich. The three Longwood partners earlier worked with Sinclair at Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. OvaScience received a $6 million Series A round from Longwood and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company has 10 employees.

“The vision Longwood had was to marry the two technologies so their combination could be used to improve IVF outcomes at fertility clinics,” Chappel added. He noted that the success rate of IVF is notoriously bad, especially for women aged 35-42, because their oocytes don’t have enough energy to go through the rapid cell division for fertilization. OvaScience’s technology, using Tilly’s discoveries, adds mitochondria from certain higher energy epithelial cells. The mitochondria isolated from the egg stem cells are then injected into the egg at the same time as the father’s sperm, a procedure known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). That procedure is already commonplace during IVF.

“We hope that with the improved quality of the oocyte, that we will be able to decrease the number of embryos that need to be transferred, avoiding multiple births and minimizing the risk of medical issues,” Chappel said. He said that success rates with current methods of IVF in older women who have failed with the procedure one to two times are only 10-12 percent, and he hopes to significantly improve that. But first, the company has to run clinical trials. It expects to start trials at two Massachusetts IVF clinics beginning in early 2012, but it is still working on documentation.

Critical to the company’s approach is that the mitochondria has to be from the same individual providing the oocyte, not from a donor, and it has to be pristine, germ-line quality mitochondria without mutations.

“Egg quality is one of the most important factors influencing IVF,” Dipp said. She said Tilly’s reproductive technology breakthrough, added to the fertility market having had few breakthroughs and the large potential sales, drew her interest to start OvaScience. She said 7 million women are labeled infertile, and 3.2 million of those seek help from doctors, though only 60,000 undergo IVF. Part of the problem is the high cost of the procedure. “Patients do a cost-benefit analysis,” she said.

Dipp expects the company’s product, which will be a mix of a service and the energy-rich mitochondria isolated from the egg stem cell, will initially be used by women who failed IVF a couple times, but eventually by all patients. Following the clinical trial, the company may launch a product in 2013.

Currently, it uses a contract research organization to perform the lab work, but it plans to take that function in house in a new location, likely in the Boston or Cambridge areas. “We’re looking now,” said Dipp.

Dipp  also previously worked in healthcare private equity at The Wellcome Trust in London. Longwood Founders has raised $85 million in its first fund in December.  In February 2010, the fund made its first investment in Alnara Pharmaceuticals Inc.