Biotech start-up Orchid is one of the few companies offering in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) patients the option to screen their embryos for severe genetic diseases before their pregnancy begins.
“This technology is going to totally reshape how people have children,” Orchid’s CEO Noor Siddiqui told CNBC’s The Edge in an interview.
“I think it’s going to become an option that more and more people will choose because there’s just the opportunity to avoid a lot of catastrophic outcomes, and they don’t want to roll the dice on their child’s health,” Siddiqui added.
During IVF, a woman takes fertility hormones to suppress her natural menstrual cycle and increase the number of eggs in her ovaries. Once her eggs are collected, they are mixed with the sperm and fertilized in a lab. The viable embryos are then transferred to the uterus.
Siddiqui says that Orchid has developed a new technology that sequences 99% of an embryo’s entire genome before implantation in the womb and screens for over 1,200 monogenic conditions, as well as some polygenic diseases.
“When you have an embryo sample, you have about 125 cells on day five, and the embryologist at the IVF lab sends us about five of those cells, and in those five cells, you only have about 10,000 times less than the amount of DNA that you would have in a blood or saliva sample. So, what we had to invent is a new amplification protocol, as well as a new computational pipeline,” Siddiqui said.
The embryo screening process takes between two and three weeks, after which patients receive a whole genome embryo report. Orchid’s counselors go through the report and help patients decide which embryo to move forward.
Despite having been cleared by the Federal Drug Administration as a laboratory developed test (LDT) and backed by geneticists like George Church and Carlos Bustamante, Orchid’s procedure has failed to convince some.
“These tests, in general, cost money, often not covered by insurance. And so increasingly, breast cancer, for instance, is becoming more a disease of the poor because people can afford to undergo IVF and screen out breast cancer mutations when they’ve had a family history of breast cancer. I think that raises a problem ethically,” bioethicist and Columbia University professor Robert Klitzman told The Edge in an interview.
Orchid currently charges $2,500 per embryo screening. That’s in addition to the IVF process which, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ranges from $15,000 to $20,000 for a single cycle and sometimes requires several attempts. To mitigate the costs, the company has a philanthropic program that patients on low incomes can apply for.
Orchid’s technology is now available nationwide in the U.S. except in New York state, where Orchid had applied for a license to operate at the time of the interview.
Learn more about Orchid’s technology by clicking the video above.