rompted 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.
