Science & Product
Embryo implantation is the biggest bottleneck in IVF.
Most people know someone who is struggling to have children. You surely know one or more, don’t you?
Infertility affects approximately one in six people worldwide, translating to millions who silently struggle with the emotional and financial burden of infertility. While more and more people undergo IVF, success remains modest.
Only one in four patients who start a given treatment cycle get pregnant and only one in five get a healthy baby. The biggest bottleneck is embryo implantation: more than two out of three embryo transfers fail. Consequently, most patients undergo multiple, emotionally draining and costly procedures or give up their dream of building a family entirely.
For some reason today most innovations in the IVF lab focus on automation or AI tools to predict the embryo with the highest chances of success. That’s stupid. Those innovations don’t really change the odds for the patients overall, because they only select from what’s available. They don’t ask the fundamental question why so many embryos fail to reach healthy blastocyst stage in the first place. And hence they don’t fundamentally improve the quality and trajectory of the biological material. We are on a mission to change this.
First Principles
Grounded in rigorous science and data, we go to the root of the problem.
First principles thinking breaks complex problems down to their most fundamental truths and then rebuilds solutions from the ground up, rather than relying on assumptions or analogies. We don’t accept that success rates in IVF must be limited to a certain number, because that’s how they are in nature or in the best IVF clinics in the world. We believe everyone who starts IVF should go home with a healthy baby. (We don’t think that everyone should start IVF – many start far too late – but that’s a different story.)
We are convinced that the innovations and technologies aiming at finding the embryo with the highest chances are asking the wrong question.
They ask: “How do we identify the best embryo?”
We ask “Why?”
Grounded in rigorous science and data, we go to the root of the problem.
First principles thinking breaks complex problems down to their most fundamental truths and then rebuilds solutions from the ground up, rather than relying on assumptions or analogies. We don’t accept that success rates in IVF must be limited to a certain number, because that’s how they are in nature or in the best IVF clinics in the world. We believe everyone who starts IVF should go home with a healthy baby. (We don’t think that everyone should start IVF – many start far too late – but that’s a different story.)
We are convinced that the innovations and technologies aiming at finding the embryo with the highest chances are asking the wrong question.
They ask: “How do we identify the best embryo?”
We ask “Why?”
Why do so many embryo transfers fail?
Because not enough embryos reach sufficient quality.
Why do not enough embryos reach sufficient quality?
Because they don’t have what they need to thrive.
Why do they not have what they need to thrive?
Because we are taking them out of their natural environment and don’t really know what they need.
Why do we not know what they need?
Because, for good reasons, we don’t experiment with human embryos to find out and because the insights generated in animal models don’t fully apply to humans. If we could decode the signals that an embryo needs to thrive and bring them into the IVF lab, then we should be able to dramatically increase the number of oocytes that make it all the way to a good quality blastocyst and eventually to a healthy baby. This is where our platform technology comes in.
Our Platform Technology
Our platform technology allows us – for the first time in history – to mimic, monitor and modify early human embryo development.
It’s a stem-cell based human embryo model called blastoid. Blastoid, because it’s an organoid resembling the human blastocyst. Blastocysts are those beautiful spheres that consist of an outer shell, the trophectoderm that becomes the future placenta, and the inner cell mass, which holds the promise of new life. Our blastoids look and behave remarkably similar to blastocysts. We first developed them in mice (Rivron 2019) and subsequently with human stem cells (Kagawa and Javali 2022).
Human blastocyst
Scarce, highly variable
Human blastoids faithfully model human blastocyst
Virtually infinite, highly similar
With this technology we can screen molecules, at scale, for their effect on early human embryo development and we can even monitor and measure implantation itself.
This puts us in a unique position:
In a first step, we will give clinics the power to create more and healthier embryos, turning dreams of families into reality.
Research & whitepapers
dawn-bio GmbH, Dr.-Bohr-Gasse 7, 1030 Vienna, Austria, FN 596389 v
