Date & Time of event : 2020, June 17
Alexandra Boussommier-Calleja, PhD in Biomedical/Medical engineering, CEO and Co-Founder at ImVitro. For career opportunities check the ImVitro’s jobs page! Here is more information about the speaker.
Video from the event you can watch on our Youtube channel Paris Biotech
Building your own startup after PhD studies
What is in vitro fertilization
How AI can improve in vitro fertilization
Startup ecosystem in Paris
Individual Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships MSCA-IF for research in academia or industry
Entrepreneur First Program to make your startup
French Biotech is rapidly growing with over 2k companies employing >300K people. These companies are created at intersection of biology and pharmacology, chemistry, engineering, business, healthcare, data science, statistics and artificial intelligence (AI). ImVitro is an innovative growing company revolutionizing in vitro fertilization (IVF) with artificial intelligence (AI). Dr. Alexandra Boussommier-Calleja, PhDin Biomedical/Medical engineering is the CEO and Co-Founder at ImVitro.
Here is the story of Dr. Alexandra Boussommier-Calleja:
What is your background?
I did my BSc in Bioengineering in Ecole Politechnique Federale in Switzerland, MSc and PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College of London and then I worked as post-doc at Massachusetts Institute of technology (USA). I received several scholarships and it had great impact on my work.
What is your research experience?
I worked in fundamental research and it was revolving about tissues and cell cultures, maintaining them in the lab. During my PhD I studied using imaging whether a mouse model of glaucoma is a good one to study this eye disease. For my postdoc I moved to MIT to Prof. R.D. Kamm’s lab where they study cell biomechanics and microfluidics. I created a 3D model of cancer-immune cell interactions using data from light time-lapse microscopy. I was also writing a blog at Incyteful about cell cultures and I write to Technology Networks. Then I went to Entrepreneur First Program where I started developing ideas for my own company.
Why building your own startup after PhD studies? I had experience with growing cell cultures and I was passionate about optimizing this process. It seemed to me like a crucial task especially because this procedure is used in patients. There are many ways to improve quality of cell cultures and one of the ways is to automatize the analysis of images of cell cultures. Growing cell cultures is the crucial aspect of IVF where you grow embryos in a “Petri dish”. All these stages are captured on video and automatic analysis of which can be useful to select the healthiest embryos before implanting them back into patients.
Why vitro fertilization (IVF) is important?
1 out of 7 couple suffers from infertility and their problem can be solved with IVF. However, the success rate of IVF is not very high. In UK in 2005 it was about 30% and for the past 15 years this number grew only by 5%. 70% of couples do not get pregnancy from a single procedure. It means that for many couples this procedure has to be repeated several times and it can be definitely improved.
What is IVF and why it is in important?
IVF procedure is a relatively young field that started being used for roughly 45 years. IVF is a process of fertilization of an egg by sperm in vitro, e.g. in a test tube in the lab. After that, a fertilized egg undergoes embryonic development for 2–6 days as a culture in an incubator in the lab. Selected embryos then are implanted in the woman’s uterus with a hope that at least one will lead to a pregnancy. However, often this process leads to multiple pregnancies which can be dangerous for the mother and the babies. It means that better prediction of embryos quality can also reduce the number of multiple pregnancies.
What kind of problems now exist in IVF?
IVF is a process that involves several procedures (eggs and sperm collection, grooving and selecting embryos, preimplantation, etc.). All these stages affect the success rate of the procedure and can be improved using AI.
How AI can improve in vitro fertilization?
At ImVitro we hope to increase the success rate by another 5% by improving evaluation of embryos. Currently, around 2.5M of IVF cycles are performed every year and 5% improvement in success rate can save 5K couples from repeating this procedure. At ImVitro we are starting with evaluation of embryos because there is data that can be used for AI-based algorithms of analysis. There are several existing methods to evaluate embryos. First method is very invasive, because embryos are cut open to take come cells for genetic testing (chromosome numbers, etc.). Second method is a noninvasive imaging where evaluation of embryos is done using their morphological properties. The latter can potentially damage embryos while taking them out of incubator for imaging and we risk missing important information by evaluating the embryos just by their morphology. Our approach at ImVitro is to apply AI-based algorithms for data collected from continuous video of developing in time embryos while in an incubator.
What is your approach to improve evaluation of embryos using AI?
We are developing software as a service (SaaS) based on Deep Learning algorithm to help doctors to select embryos for the procedure. Our algorithm will be train on the data where we have the data from a time-lapse of a developing embryo and the data from the results of IVF, e.g. if it lead to pregnancy or not. This software will help doctors to take more informed decision about quality of embryos without potential biases. Currently we are in the process of collecting enough data from clinics to train our algorithm. We expect to have first version of our algorithm by the mid of the next year, because it is a medical device and we need to go through regulations.
Do you like startup ecosystem in Paris?
Yes, I love Paris. Paris now is turning into a very vibrant startup ecosystem with lots of opportunities. For example, there are many incubators for startups such as Station F, Agoranov, EF, etc. There are a lot of Governmental incentives to support startups and provide funding, lower taxes etc. BPI France provides grants for young Tech companies. There are also a lot of great schools and brilliant people in France.