Californian start-up Alife Health is helping fertility clinics use data-driven insights and artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise and support clinical decision-making during critical stages of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF).

The Alife Assist platform is a suite of products to process and streamline overall clinic operations. This marks the company’s official entry into the clinical market after conducting two years of research and development with clinic partners, advisors and investors.

“I founded Alife because I knew that AI has the potential to drastically impact the IVF process,” said Paxton Maeder-York, CEO of Alife. “Yet, as we began to work with fertility clinics around the country, we quickly identified a parallel opportunity for improvement: the need for a central platform to digitise clinic workflow and support collective decision-making. Our team is thrilled to launch Alife Assist, a first-of-its-kind product suite that optimises the IVF process from end to end. Together, our products will help clinics harness the power of AI and advanced analytics to streamline their workflow and bring a more personalised experience to their patients.”

The platform is made up of three products that are supported by the team’s scientific research and collaboration with clinics:

• Stim Assist is a set of AI-powered clinical decision support tools that helps reproductive endocrinologists choose the optimal medication dose and timing to increase the number of mature eggs retrieved from an ovarian stimulation cycle. These tools use one of the largest and most diverse IVF datasets in the world, which contains millions of rows of historical data from previous patient cycles to provide insights on what treatment has worked best for similar patients. Alife’s research indicates that in general more mature oocytes are associated with a higher live birth percentage.
• Embryo Assist streamlines and enhances an embryologist’s workflow in a single tool to keep consistent records, save time and automate reports. This enables embryologists to capture, grade, organise and report embryo grading data digitally as never before, all with real-time EMR connection.
• Insights is an analytics dashboard that gives directors, managers and administrators the ability to monitor and visualise their clinic’s performance in real time. This simplifies the process of extracting trends and sharing reports to optimise overall clinic operations.

Alife Assist is available for IVF clinics in the USA.

“AI has enormous potential to help inform our decisions as clinicians,” said Louis Weckstein from the San Ramon Fertility Clinic in California. “When it comes to patient care decision making, the more data and information, the better. If we can harness the knowledge of thousands of past patient cycles from clinics around the world, we can make more informed choices about the patient sitting right in front of us.”

Alife’s mission is to modernise and personalise the IVF process with artificial intelligence to improve outcomes and care for all. The company has built a consortium of partnerships with the clinics and physicians to bring clinical improvements to patients globally. Founded by Paxton Maeder-York in 2020, the company is based in San Francisco and backed by venture capital investors including Lux Capital, Union Square Ventures and Maveron.