 |
OVA EASY: Jones thinks harvesting
a young woman's eggs will give her more career
and child-bearing options.
Frank Veronsky |
Prompted in part
by Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s 2002 book Creating
a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,
national newsweeklies ran trend stories about high-achieving
women who postponed motherhood until it was too late.
They had spent years building careers, but when they
wanted to build families many encountered fertility
problems.
Christy Jones thought modern technology must somehow
be able to help women bear children later. “We’d
been told we could have it all, and all of a sudden
it’s like, ‘No, you can’t—egg
quality deteriorates,’” Jones says.
Her search for answers brought her back to Stanford
where Barry Behr, an assistant professor of obstetrics
and gynecology and the director of the IVF/ART and Andrology
Laboratories, was working on improving in-vitro fertilization
and other assisted reproduction technology. Jones learned
that young women who are diagnosed with cancer sometimes
have eggs frozen before undergoing toxic treatments.
Pregnancy rates from such eggs used to be very low—1
to 2 percent—but they had improved to 20 or 30
percent with better freezing techniques and solutions.
Why, Jones wondered, couldn’t healthy women for
whom pregnancy wasn’t imminently feasible do the
same?
Jones already had an impressive track record as an
entrepreneur. She helped lead two companies, Trilogy
Software and pcOrder, which grew to revenues of $150
million and $50 million, respectively. Last year, Jones,
while working on an MBA at Harvard, put together a business
plan to license the technologies that were improving
egg-freezing techniques and to market them to women
who wanted to preserve their chances of having a biological
child. A new company—Extend Fertility—was
born.
Here’s how Extend Fertility’s program works:
a woman comes to a center affiliated with the company,
preferably before she is 35 years old. The company thinks
most of its clients will be unmarried, but its services
are also an option for couples. After counseling, the
woman will undergo drug therapy to stimulate her ovaries
and then have her eggs harvested through a needle. The
outpatient procedure ideally nets about a dozen eggs
to be frozen. The cost: $13,000 to $15,000, plus $400
to $500 a year for storage.
Years later, if the woman seeks to become pregnant,
she asks a fertility doctor to thaw the eggs and have
them fertilized by injecting sperm into the egg. That
should allow some women otherwise unable to conceive
to bear children well into their 40s.
Extend Fertility centers opened in the spring in Los
Angeles and at Stanford. Jones is working on deals for
sites in Boston, Texas and New York.
“It's better to conceive if you can naturally
during your fertile years,” she says. “That's
an inescapable fact. This is just about bringing more
options to women.” Jones, for one, is keeping
her options open: now 34, she put her own eggs on ice
in May. |
