Episode 64: Conception Bio

In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives, we explore the story of Conception Bio, one of the most ambitious biotechnology companies working at the intersection of stem cell biology, reproductive medicine, and regenerative science. Their mission? To make eggs from ordinary cells through in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), a breakthrough that could fundamentally change how we think about infertility, fertility preservation, and human reproduction.

We'll dive into the science behind IVG, the pioneering research that made the field possible, the founders' vision, and why investors believe reproductive biology could become one of biotech's next major frontiers. We'll also discuss the enormous technical hurdles, ethical questions, and potential applications for cancer survivors, age-related infertility, LGBTQ+ family building, and beyond.

Because the next revolution in medicine may not be about curing disease, it may be about creating life's very first cell.

🎧 Listen now, stay curious, and don’t forget to subscribe for new episodes every Thursday!

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Petri Dish Perspectives, the podcast where we geek out about science and the companies shaping the future of healthcare. I’m your host, Manead, and I’m a PhD scientist by training, biotech storyteller by choice. With every new episode released on Thursday, my goal is to deliver digestible pieces of information on healthcare companies under 30 mins. 

If I asked you what the most valuable cell in the human body is, you might say a stem cell. Maybe a neuron. Maybe an immune cell engineered to fight cancer.

But what if the answer is an egg?

Every human life begins with one. Yet women are born with a finite supply, and unlike almost every other cell in the body, eggs cannot regenerate. Their quality drops with age. Fertility treatments are expensive, physically brutal, and still dependent on one thing that hasn't changed in decades — eggs collected from a human ovary.

That's the bottleneck. Not IVF. Not embryo selection. Not the technology in the lab. The egg itself.

Conception Bio thinks that assumption is worth challenging. Their goal isn't to make IVF slightly better — it's to manufacture human eggs from ordinary cells entirely outside the body. If that sounds like science fiction, that's because until very recently, it was.

Today we're going deep on one of the most audacious bets in modern biotechnology — a company trying to do something no one has ever done before: engineer the most fundamental building block of human life.

Quick disclaimer, I give full credit to the original articles cited in the references in the transcript!

Grab a coffee or tea, settle in, and let’s jump in!

Why Fertility Medicine Is Overdue for a Reckoning

Let's start with what the fertility industry gets right — and where it has been stuck for a very long time.

Modern IVF is genuinely remarkable. Since Louise Brown became the first IVF baby in 1978, more than twelve million babies have been born through assisted reproductive technologies. Embryologists can now freeze embryos for decades, screen them for genetic disease before implantation, and achieve pregnancy rates that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. The science that supports IVF today — cryopreservation, preimplantation genetic testing, improved hormone protocols — represents extraordinary medical progress.

But here's what bothers me about the standard fertility medicine narrative: almost all of that progress is optimization. Better hormones. Better freezing techniques. Better microscopes. Better embryo selection algorithms. Every major advance in fertility medicine over the past forty years has been about doing the same fundamental thing more efficiently.

The fundamental constraint — that you still need eggs from a human ovary — has never been touched.

And that constraint fails a staggering number of people. Women over 35 facing steep, often unexpected declines in egg quality. Cancer patients who lose fertility permanently after chemotherapy or radiation. People born with Turner syndrome or premature ovarian insufficiency who never had functional ovaries to begin with. Same-sex male couples who require donated eggs and gestational carriers just to have a genetically related child. Transgender women and non-binary individuals facing impossible decisions about fertility preservation before beginning gender-affirming care.

For all of these people, the fertility industry's answer has largely been the same: work around the limitation as best you can. Donor eggs. Surrogacy. Adoption. Acceptance.

Conception Bio is the first serious attempt to solve the underlying problem rather than work around it.

The Science That Made This Possible

To understand why Conception Bio exists, you have to understand one experiment that changed everything.

In 2012, Japanese developmental biologist Dr. Katsuhiko Hayashi — alongside Dr. Mitinori Saitou at Kyoto University — demonstrated something that the reproductive biology field had long considered impossible. They took ordinary mouse skin cells, reprogrammed them into induced pluripotent stem cells, guided those cells through the precise developmental steps that normally occur inside a living ovary, and produced functional eggs. Eggs that, when fertilized, produced healthy, fertile mouse pups.

That result was seismic. Not because it was immediately clinically applicable — it wasn't. But because it proved something profound: the developmental program that governs egg formation isn't exclusively locked inside the ovary. It's a biological instruction set. A sequence of molecular signals. And in principle, those signals could be recreated in a laboratory setting.

Hayashi and Saitou didn't just publish a paper. They cracked open an entirely new field.

To appreciate why this was so significant, it helps to understand how eggs are normally made. Every egg originates from a specialized cell type called a primordial germ cell, which appears during the very earliest stages of embryonic development. These cells migrate toward the developing gonads, enter an extraordinarily complex developmental program involving hundreds of molecular signals firing in precise sequence, undergo meiosis — the specialized cell division that halves chromosomal content — and eventually become mature oocytes. In humans, this process begins before birth and isn't fully completed until a specific egg is actually ovulated, decades later.

Recreating that outside the body is not a simple task. Every developmental signal has to fire in the right sequence. Chromosomes have to segregate with near-perfect fidelity. Epigenetic marks — the chemical tags that control which genes are active and which are silenced — have to be correctly reset. The resulting cells have to be capable of normal fertilization and healthy embryonic development. And any error anywhere along that chain could have consequences that don't become apparent until much later.

This is precisely why it took decades of fundamental biological research just to reach the starting line. And it's why, even after Hayashi's landmark mouse experiments, translating the same process to human cells remains one of the hardest open problems in developmental biology. Human reproductive biology is significantly more complex than mouse biology. Human germ cell development takes far longer. The safety standards required before any clinical application are orders of magnitude higher.

Conception Bio is trying to close that gap — systematically, rigorously, and at scale.

The Founding Story

Conception Bio was built on a premise that sounds simple but is actually quite radical: reproductive biology deserves the same level of engineering ambition that gave us CRISPR, CAR-T therapies, and mRNA vaccines.

The founders weren't interested in improving existing fertility treatments at the margins. They looked at reproductive medicine and saw a field that had been doing essentially the same thing since 1978, and asked whether the underlying biology itself could be engineered differently. They saw reproductive cells not as a fixed biological given, but as an engineering problem — one that could be approached with the right combination of stem cell biology, developmental biology, computational tools, and high-throughput experimental platforms.

What makes Conception's approach distinctive is that they're not simply trying to recreate the Hayashi mouse experiment in human cells. They're building an integrated platform for reproductive cell engineering — one that combines induced pluripotent stem cell technology, single-cell genomics to track what's happening at every step of differentiation, machine learning to identify the signals that drive cells toward the right developmental fate, and high-throughput screening to test thousands of conditions simultaneously.

In other words, they're applying the tools of modern biotech drug development to a problem that reproductive medicine has never approached that way before.

The Human Impact: Who This Technology Could Change Everything For

This is the section I think gets underappreciated in most coverage of Conception Bio and IVG more broadly. The science is fascinating, but the human stakes are what make this company genuinely important.

Let's talk about who benefits if this works.

Women facing age-related infertility. This is the largest group. Egg quality and quantity decline significantly after 35, and dramatically after 40. Women who delayed having children for educational, professional, or personal reasons — or simply hadn't found the right circumstances — frequently discover that the biological window closed faster than they expected. IVG could allow any cell from a woman's body to become a source of eggs, bypassing age-related decline entirely.

Cancer survivors. An estimated 10% of cancer diagnoses occur in people of reproductive age. Chemotherapy and radiation are often devastating to fertility, and while egg freezing before treatment is possible, it requires weeks of hormone stimulation that not every patient — particularly those with hormone-sensitive cancers — can afford to wait for. IVG could eventually offer a path for cancer survivors to have genetically related children using cells preserved before treatment, without the urgency or physical demand of conventional egg freezing.

People with premature ovarian insufficiency. Roughly one in 100 women experiences menopause before age 40, often without warning. Currently, their primary option for having a genetically related child is donor eggs. IVG could change that, potentially allowing skin cells to become the source of functional eggs regardless of ovarian function.

Same-sex male couples. This is one of the more profound potential applications. Today, gay male couples who want a genetically related child require both a donor egg and a gestational carrier. IVG raises the possibility — still scientifically distant and ethically complex — of deriving egg cells from male somatic cells, potentially allowing both partners to contribute genetically to a child. Hayashi's recent work generating eggs from male mouse cells, while far from any clinical application, showed that this isn't biologically impossible.

Transgender and non-binary individuals. Fertility preservation for transgender people is deeply complicated by the timelines of gender-affirming care and by the limited options currently available. IVG could eventually provide a pathway for individuals who transitioned before preserving fertility to still have genetically related children using preserved somatic cells.

Single individuals by choice. An increasingly significant group of people are choosing to have children without a partner. IVG doesn't remove all of the complexity from that decision, but it could reduce some of the biological urgency that currently shapes it.

The common thread across all of these groups is the same: biology currently imposes constraints that have nothing to do with someone's fitness as a parent, their desire to have children, or their access to medical care. If IVG works, many of those constraints become optional rather than absolute.

That's not a minor incremental improvement. That's a fundamental shift in human reproductive autonomy.

Why Investors Are Paying Attention

Although Conception remains a private company, it has attracted backing from some of biotechnology's most respected investors. Understanding why requires looking at the market with clear eyes.

Globally, infertility affects roughly one in six people according to the World Health Organization. The global fertility services market is already worth tens of billions of dollars and is growing every year as first-time parenthood is delayed across developed countries. In the United States alone, IVF cycles cost between fifteen and thirty thousand dollars each, and most patients require multiple cycles. Insurance coverage remains inconsistent. The financial and emotional burden on families is enormous.

But here's what the standard market analysis misses: the current fertility market only captures people who are already seeking treatment. IVG has the potential to expand the addressable population dramatically — to cancer survivors who wrote off biological parenthood, to same-sex couples who assumed donor eggs were their only option, to individuals who didn't know they had a fertility issue until it was too late for conventional treatment.

The venture calculus here is straightforward even if the science is not. If IVG works, it doesn't just compete in the existing fertility market. It creates a new one.

The Ethical Weight of What They're Building

Here's where I want to be direct, because I think this conversation deserves more than a list of questions.

IVG isn't just a scientific challenge. It is a technology that could fundamentally alter who gets to reproduce, when, and under what circumstances. And that means it will generate controversy — some of it legitimate, some of it reflexive.

The legitimate concerns are real. When laboratory-generated eggs are eventually ready for clinical testing, how do we establish safety? Epigenetic errors that seem minor in a cell could theoretically have consequences that only become apparent in a developing embryo, or in the child years later. The safety bar has to be extraordinarily high, and establishing it will require years of preclinical work that cannot be rushed.

There are also questions about access. If IVG becomes clinically available, will it be affordable? Or will it, like so many advanced reproductive technologies, be available primarily to the wealthy? A technology that expands reproductive autonomy for some while remaining out of reach for others isn't the equity story it appears to be on the surface.

Then there are the more philosophically complex questions. Should there be age limits on IVG-assisted reproduction? Should the technology ever be used to create embryos solely for research purposes? What are the rights of children born through IVG — do they have a claim to information about the somatic cell donor if it differs from their social parent?

I don't think any of these questions should stop the research. What I do think is that the field needs to engage with them proactively and publicly, rather than waiting for a clinical milestone to force the conversation. The history of reproductive medicine — from IVF to egg freezing to preimplantation genetic testing — suggests that society is generally capable of working through these questions. But it works through them better when scientists and companies are transparent partners in the conversation rather than reluctant participants.

Conception Bio has an opportunity to set a standard here. How they handle public communication, regulatory engagement, and ethical oversight will matter as much as the science.

The Competitive Landscape

Conception Bio isn't operating in a vacuum. A small number of other companies and academic groups are pursuing IVG, each with slightly different approaches and timelines.

In Japan, Dr. Hayashi's continued academic work represents perhaps the most advanced scientific program in the world, and there has been ongoing discussion about whether and when Japanese regulatory authorities might permit limited human IVG research. The Japanese government has historically taken a cautious but not prohibitive approach to reproductive technology research.

In the United States, the regulatory environment is more complex. The FDA has jurisdiction over clinical applications of cell-based therapies, and any human IVG clinical trial would face an extensive regulatory process. The absence of federal funding for human embryo research — a longstanding political constraint — has historically slowed academic progress in this space, which is part of why private companies like Conception are playing such a central role.

Other startups have emerged in adjacent spaces — companies focused on ovarian tissue preservation, artificial womb technology, and extended embryo culture — but none has yet staked out the same explicit IVG focus as Conception.

What this means practically is that Conception is operating at the frontier of a field where the competitive dynamics haven't yet formed. That's both an opportunity and a risk. They have a chance to define the space. But they're also doing so without established benchmarks, regulatory precedents, or a clear timeline to clinical application.

Lessons from Conception Bio

Every company we cover on this show teaches us something about how biotech actually works. Conception Bio offers several lessons worth sitting with.

The biggest problems attract the most ambitious science. Conception didn't emerge because the founders wanted to build a company. It emerged because the scientific moment — the convergence of iPSC technology, single-cell genomics, and Hayashi's foundational mouse work — finally made the problem tractable. The best biotech companies tend to form when a long-standing biological barrier suddenly looks solvable with new tools.

Foundational research has commercial value that isn't always immediately obvious. Hayashi and Saitou spent years doing academic biology with no commercial roadmap. That work is now the foundation of a company that could eventually be worth billions. Basic science investment pays off — it just often does so on a timeline that markets struggle to value.

Reproductive medicine has been systematically underinvested relative to its importance. Consider how much capital has flowed into oncology, neurology, and cardiovascular medicine compared to reproductive biology. Fertility affects one in six people globally. The emotional and economic costs of infertility are enormous. Yet the field received a fraction of the research attention of other therapeutic areas for decades. Conception Bio is partly a bet that that imbalance is finally being corrected.

Platform companies in biology are risky but potentially transformative. Conception isn't developing a single drug for a single indication. They're building a platform for reproductive cell engineering. That means longer timelines, more scientific risk, and more capital required before clinical proof of concept. But it also means that a successful platform has applications across multiple diseases, populations, and use cases simultaneously. The risk profile is different from a traditional biotech — and so is the potential upside.

Ethical engagement is a competitive advantage, not a burden. Companies that proactively engage with the ethical dimensions of their technology tend to navigate regulatory and public scrutiny better than those that treat ethics as an obstacle. In a field as sensitive as human reproduction, Conception's approach to these questions will shape not just their own trajectory but the regulatory environment for the entire IVG field.

What's Next

Conception Bio is still deep in the scientific foundation phase. That's not a criticism — it's simply the reality of what they're attempting. The milestones that matter in the near term are all preclinical: improving the efficiency and reproducibility of germ cell differentiation from human iPSCs, validating genetic and epigenetic stability across multiple cell lines, demonstrating that laboratory-generated human germ cells can complete meiosis correctly, and building the computational tools to understand and optimize each step of the process.

Beyond the immediate scientific challenges, the company will need to begin engaging with regulators and bioethicists well before any clinical application is on the horizon. The FDA's framework for cell-based therapies is well established in some areas and almost entirely uncharted in others. IVG sits firmly in the uncharted territory. Building the regulatory pathway in parallel with the science isn't optional — it's essential.

Longer term, the company's vision extends toward a clinical platform capable of generating human eggs reliably enough for therapeutic use. That's likely a decade away, possibly more. But the intermediate milestones — improved understanding of human germ cell biology, better tools for assessing genetic safety, deeper insight into epigenetic reprogramming — have value in their own right, both scientifically and potentially commercially through partnerships with academic institutions, fertility clinics, and pharmaceutical companies working in adjacent areas.

The most important near-term signal to watch isn't a clinical trial. It's whether the underlying science continues to advance — whether Conception and the broader IVG field can demonstrate reproducibility in human cells at a level that justifies continued investment and begins building the evidentiary foundation for eventual regulatory engagement.

Outro

Here's what I keep coming back to with Conception Bio.

Every technology that now seems obvious was once considered radical. IVF was ethically controversial when it was introduced — newspapers ran headlines about "test tube babies" with genuine alarm. Stem cell research was politically radioactive for years. CRISPR gene editing seemed like science fiction until it was happening in clinical trials. Each of those technologies moved from the fringes of science into standard clinical practice not because the ethical concerns disappeared, but because the evidence accumulated, the safeguards were established, and the benefits became impossible to ignore.

Conception Bio is early. The science is genuinely hard. The regulatory path doesn't fully exist yet. The ethical questions are real and deserve serious engagement. But the problem they're trying to solve is also real — and it affects millions of people around the world who currently have no good options.

The couples who have exhausted IVF cycles. The cancer survivors who never got to freeze their eggs. The same-sex partners who want a child that's genetically theirs. The women who discovered too late that their biological clock had already run out.

For those people, Conception Bio isn't an interesting intellectual exercise. It's the possibility of something they had already stopped hoping for.

That's worth paying attention to. And it's worth getting right.

This has been Petri Dish Perspectives. I’m Manead. Thanks for listening. See you next Thursday. Good bye.

References

1. https://www.conception.bio/ 
2. www.wikipedia.org
3. https://endpoints.news/ 
4. https://pitchbook.com/ 

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