If you’re considering IVF, you need to talk about how your frozen eggs and embryos are stored.
Going through the egg-freezing or IVF journey can be a rollercoaster of emotions. There’s the initial excitement over deciding to take control of your fertility, but that feeling of empowerment can quickly become overshadowed by trying to find the right clinic and doctor. The endless appointments, injections, ultrasounds, and blood tests can feel overwhelming (but so worth it). You might get the happy news that you had a successful egg retrieval or a positive pregnancy test, or deal with heartbreak when treatments fail or miscarriage occurs.
During this wild ride, what would be the most unfathomable news to receive? Possibly discovering that, despite all of your efforts, your eggs or embryos were lost because of a storage tank malfunction.
Unfortunately, that’s a reality that many patients have grappled with. In 2018, a tank failure at the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco ruined over 3,500 frozen eggs and embryos. Across the country in Cleveland, that same day, over 4,000 eggs and embryos were lost. That’s why one of the most important questions to ask your doctor before starting treatments is, “How will my eggs and/or embryos be stored?”
Spoiler alert: Enter TMRW Life Sciences, a fertility technology company modernizing frozen egg and embryo management and storage. They are on a mission to improve safety and standards, and to educate patients on questions they should ask about the lab — a part of the process that’s often overlooked.
Monica Coakley, a marketing executive based in San Francisco, was in a demanding job, single, and traveling a lot for work when she decided to freeze her eggs, just shy of her 37th birthday. “My first round of egg-freezing was really strong and super successful,” says Coakley. “I felt the most tremendous amount of relief. I now had this insurance that I would hopefully never need, but knew that I had.” The tick of the biological clock muted, and Coakley says she felt 20 pounds lighter. “I began dating people differently and I took another job that I probably wouldn’t have taken,” she shares. “It was a profoundly positive experience for me.”
But that all changed on March 11, 2018, when Coakley received an email from her doctor at Pacific Fertility Center that indicated a storage tank malfunction might have impacted her eggs. The devastating news hit Coakley hard — but she hung on to hope that maybe her eggs weren’t damaged. Coakley says she wasn’t receiving clear-cut answers from the clinic about the viability of her eggs.
It wasn’t until a year and a half later, in the fall of 2019, when Coakley chose to start the IVF process with a sperm donor that she got a firm answer as to how her eggs had been impacted by the 2018 malfunction. It was only then that she received confirmation from her doctor that the tank failure had destroyed her eggs. Coakley, 43 at the time, decided to go through two fresh rounds of IVF — but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
“Since then I’ve put this journey on pause,” says Coakley, who is now 46. “It was too much to do three rounds in a year, to start down the egg donor path, or [to make the decision] to adopt. It’s a devastating thing for someone to tell you that your parts don’t work.”This experience opened up Coakley’s eyes to the importance of asking your fertility doctors where and how your eggs and embryos will be stored. “We all have this notion that there’s super-advanced digital technology behind the curtain,” says Coakley. “You would think there are robotic mechanisms pulling eggs in and out of tanks, but the reality is that there are literally sticky notes on the tanks that are falling off, eggs all over the place, and it’s just a mess.”
It’s stories like Coakley’s that inspired TMRW Life Sciences to take on the mission of modernizing the fertility industry in hopes of preventing anyone from receiving the devastating news that their eggs or embryos were lost or ruined due to a storage malfunction — or human error.
“Patients deserve to know where and how their specimens are being stored and to know they have a choice between the antiquated ways of the past, or a modern, digitally-enabled solution appropriate for the modern day,” says Tara Comonte, CEO of TMRW Life Sciences.
The management and storage of frozen eggs and embryos generally falls into two camps: manual and automated. And importantly, the difference between the two is like comparing the dark ages to the 21st century.
“Legacy, manual storage systems, which include handwritten labels and datasheets, physical maintenance of specimens, and basic reactive alarms that go off after there’s a problem, are outdated and unable to meet today’s needs,” says Comonte.
The second, more advanced type of storage is technology-enabled and automated. TMRW brings the only FDA-cleared automated solution that digitally tracks, monitors, and stores frozen eggs and embryos.
TMRW’s technology-driven solution uses digital identification and tracking, automated storage to minimize human interaction, and 24/7 monitoring with tens of thousands of daily checks to discover potential issues before they become problematic.
“TMRW reduces potential points of failure by a massive 94 percent compared to the legacy manual systems,” Comonte shares. “We’re committed to offering a modern, safe, transparent solution that brings both patients and clinics peace of mind they simply don’t have today.”
Jessica Wolf, 31, a New York City-based tech founder, recently froze her eggs at RMA of New York. She spoke with a woman who had a stressful experience after the storage facility where her frozen eggs were held lost power. After hearing this story and doing more research, Wolf’s top priority when it came to choosing a fertility clinic was that they partnered with a more tech-forward company, like TMRW Life Sciences, for storage.
“Until the egg freezing process, I hadn’t known how antiquated the egg storage and management industry was,” says Wolf. “TMRW gives me peace of mind. It seemed unfathomable to me that once I went through the process of injections and hormones and body changes and emotions, never mind the cost, that my eggs might be at risk. Choosing a clinic that uses the TMRW system was an obvious decision for me.”
With demand for egg and embryo storage on the rise, storage technology needs to keep up, and automated platforms like TMRW’s make that possible. “In 2005, less than one million patients globally had frozen eggs and embryos stored, but that number is expected to reach tens of millions by 2025,” says Comonte. “Legacy manual storage systems and existing infrastructure simply can’t meet the growing needs of fertility clinics and the patients they serve.”
A recent study by Untold Research in partnership with RESOLVE: the National Infertility Association and TMRW Life Sciences surveyed over 630 patients who had undergone fertility treatments and found 94% of patients said they want automation as part of a storage process that includes digital labels, touch-of-a-button reports, multiple daily checks and predictive alarms. Accurate egg/embryo transfer and safe egg/embryo storage were the two most important factors for patients when selecting a fertility clinic, above cost, location, and doctor, according to the study. Despite this, the lack of information and knowledge around egg and embryo storage is staggering: 69 percent of patients in the study said they don’t know how their specimens are labeled, and over 88 percent said they don’t know how often wellness checks are performed on the specimens’ environment.
“If you ask any woman, ‘Where are your eggs kept after you’ve frozen them?’ They’re like, ‘I literally have no idea,'” shares Wolf. “With TMRW, you know and you feel this huge sense of reassurance.”
As fertility treatments become increasingly popular, the demand for modern, safe, and transparent storage solutions has become urgent.
“Millions of people will be born via IVF over the coming years and more and more women are already proactively freezing their eggs,” says Comonte. “We can track almost everything else in our lives but not our frozen eggs or embryos? It makes no sense. TMRW is here to upgrade and transform this part of the process; to deliver transparency and peace of mind for clinics and patients alike.”
