Ever since I graduated college, my main goal in life has been to make human in vitro gametogenesis a reality. During my MPhil and PhD, I’ve applied my full research efforts towards this goal, and although making progress hasn’t been easy, I’m a lot closer to success than I was when I started. Now, as I’m nearing the end of my PhD, I’ve recently been thinking about how I want to continue my work after I graduate.
My conclusion, after many hours of conversations, interviews, brainstorming sessions, and Paul Graham essay reading, was that the best way forward was for me to found my own startup. I was also lucky enough to meet two excellent co-founders, Travis Potter and Bogdan Dobre. Travis has a strong background in business management, and Bogdan is similarly talented in data science and machine learning. With my biological skills, the three of us make a powerful team. We’re excited to officially announce the formation of our startup, Ovelle Bio.
Ovelle’s mission is to develop and deploy advanced biological technologies to help people become parents. Our approach will mainly center on using synthetic biology tools to identify factors that can rapidly generate our cells of interest. Our first goal will be to grow eggs from stem cells derived from biological women, as that’s the main unmet need today. Although the idea of making eggs from men (or sperm from women) is also super cool, it comes with additional scientific and regulatory risks, and we don’t need any more of those, as we have plenty already.
I’m not going to sugarcoat things: startups are very hard, and most of them fail. And Ovelle will face many more challenges than the typical startup. We’re going to have to make several scientific breakthroughs to make human eggs, and even then, there’s the long hard process of demonstrating the technology is safe and effective, first to regulators and then to society. But I believe that the benefits of success are worth the risk of failure.
In the near term, our main goals are to:
Raise money
Set up a lab space, somewhere in the greater Boston area
Hire a small team of amazing scientists to help move our technology forward
If you’re an angel investor or VC and are interested in investing, if you know someone looking for a job in stem cell biology, or if you want to support Ovelle in any other way, please send us a message at contact@ovelle.bio.
Cool, Merrick. Best of luck! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions regarding clinical IVF.
This is awesome! Wishing you the best of luck!