Overture Life
Revolutionising IVF Treatment

The world has changed drastically over the past few decades and one area where those changes are especially felt is in family planning. In the past 40 years, since the first baby was born via in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), fertility rates have steadily declined due to factors such as the rise in same-sex marriages, increased male infertility, the delay of pregnancy in order for both parents to focus on their career or higher education contributing to that decline.

For most of these factors, the common thread is ‘age.’ Currently, the average age of the first conception has shifted 10 years later than previous generations. Fortunately, interventions like IVF and egg freezing are now allowing couples and individuals to have a greater say in when they want to become parents, irrespective of their age, because of the steadily improving treatments, outcomes, and accessibility. The awareness of these treatments is increasing so much that to welcome these trends from all fronts, employers and insurance providers are looking at IVF-related employee benefits and insurance coverage.

But despite these progressive developments, the ubiquitous adoption of IVF treatments is still hindered by issues such as the high costs of treatment and the inefficient manual nature of critical procedural steps, rendering the treatment not very patient-friendly. In fact, the manual processes increase the chances of failure due to ineffective implantation of embryos—the leading reason behind most unsuccessful IVF procedures. At the same time, the reliance on manual processes also significantly impacts the consistency of IVF outcomes across clinics and stops physicians from gaining access to disparate historical patient data that could enhance the efficiencies of upcoming procedures.

Spain-based Overture Life is here to change this status quo. The company is revolutionising embryology by automating embryo testing, egg freezing, and embryo freezing to improve IVF pregnancy outcomes through process automation and non-invasive embryo selection.

Making this possible is the company’s web-based, end-to-end, IVF-in-a-box solution—NaturaLife. Comprising multiple solutions that are awaiting FDA approval, NaturaLife aims to modernise IVF treatment via the holistic revamp of conventional embryology labs with a new, more intuitive, and consistent alternative where embryologists can follow a standardised approach to ensure embryo and egg viability before implantation. With NaturaLife’s process automation and non-invasive embryo selection, the company is also revolutionising embryo testing, egg freezing, and embryo freezing.

“This way, we are making IVF procedures more effective, accessible, and more importantly, affordable for clinics. And our mission is to continually work toward helping our millions of couples around the world experience parenthood,” says Santiago Munne, co-founder and CIO at Overture Life.

Under the Hood of Overture’s IVF-in-a-box

Overture offers an innovative metabolomics test that enables embryologists to non-invasively determine embryo viability by analysing the spent culture medium to conclude IVF viability. The test’s metabolomics approach eliminates the need for embryologists to collect biopsies of an embryo, which can often cause irreparable damage and undesirable issues downstream. Concurrently, the company leverages microfluidics methodologies and automates embryo and oocyte vitrification, preparation, freezing, and warming processes to improve the repeatability and accuracy of the historically inefficient and manual procedure.

If these offerings were not trailblazing already, Overture is also testing a solution that fully automates the implantation of the sperm into an egg, thereby minimising human error and driving significant time savings. “All of our products are designed to drastically simplify conventionally complex steps in the overall IVF workflow for embryologists through intelligent automation,” states Ana Garcia Poyo, VP of operations at Overture Life.

Further discussing the core competencies of the company, Santiago elaborates, “We are the only company in the current marketplace that is offering a test that is 85 to 90 percent accurate in embryo selection and automating complex critical steps across an IVF procedure.” He further adds that the goal to modernise IVF treatments is perfectly illustrated in NaturaLife’s offering, which is specially designed to scale as per the needs of a clinic, regardless of its size, maturity, or availability of highly trained personnel.

Moving forward, Overture is working toward gaining FDA approval for NaturaLife. The company has already begun collaborating with distributors in Asian markets such as Japan and India to bring its products to the growing number of affected women in those geographies. In light of this, Overture is expanding its teams in the U.S., Spain, and the U.K. to help the company penetrate additional markets. With the backing of big-name VCs and investors like Khosla Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Octopus Ventures, and GV, Overture is poised to make a huge impact in the global IVF market in the years to come.