NeoGenix Biosciences is helping infertile couples find healthy sperm, achieving a world-first with impressive results — including a baby.
Australian medtech startup NeoGenix Biosciences has achieved its first pregnancy using their ‘SpermSearch’ AI, designed to assist men with infertility issues.
According to NeoGenix Biosciences, male sperm count has decreased by 50% worldwide over the past 40 years due to factors like pollution, diet, and lifestyle choices. SpermSearch aims to combat this trend using AI, a technology that took nearly two years to develop with help from the UNSW Founders Health 10x program.
Dale Goss, NeoGenix co-founder and clinical embryologist at IVF Australia, highlights AI’s potential in reproductive health, especially given the labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of traditional sperm identification. “Traditional sperm identification is completely manual, where clinicians spend upwards of five hours searching for sperm on a microscope. That process is lengthy, expensive, and diminishes sperm quality as it dies outside of the human body,” Goss explained to SmartCompany.
In contrast, SpermSearch AI reduces search time by 75% and finds more sperm than unassisted embryologists. “With AI-assisted technology, one embryologist found 12 sperm in one-third of the time it took two embryologists without AI to find only three sperm,” Goss noted.
The AI was trained on thousands of micrograph images, starting with donor sperm, blood cells, and cancer cell lines, and later incorporating testicular samples from men undergoing biopsies after receiving ethical approval. This comprehensive dataset ensures the model can handle the variety of sperm encountered in clinical settings.
“Another major hurdle is that biopsy tissue samples can vary a lot between surgeries, especially in men with severe infertility,” Neogenix co-founder and CEO Steven Vasilescu told SmartCompany. To address this, the team created a robust dataset with tens of thousands of different sperm and used various image adjustments to improve the model’s accuracy across different microscopes and clinical environments.
Despite these challenges, SpermSearch AI has led to its first successful pregnancy in one of Australia’s most severe male infertility cases. “Without the use of SpermSearch AI and support from IVFAustralia, we don’t think the couple would’ve been able to conceive,” Vasilescu said. The AI identified four times more sperm than unassisted embryologists, resulting in two embryos, one of which was transferred and led to a clinical pregnancy.
The pregnancy is at seven weeks, with a due date set for mid-2025. “We are as overjoyed as they are,” Vasilescu said.
AI technologies like SpermSearch are expected to play an increasingly important role in fertility treatments. “We believe that AI will help analyze the data we have in clinical settings and standardize the industry. Our overall goal in the next 5-10 years would be to see SpermSearch AI used for all procedures where sperm selection is needed,” Goss stated.
NeoGenix reports positive responses from both the medical community and patients, with interest from clinics worldwide. “Many embryologists are really excited about using this technology. It can greatly reduce the time it takes to do a very repetitive task and improve the chances of success for couples who often have very low odds of having their own biological children,” Goss said.
New artificial intelligence (AI) tool can identify sperm in severely infertile men
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