Hey there 👋
Welcome to The Buzz – the fertility industry newsletter for the people experiencing it, running it and trying to make it work better. Five minutes. Let's get into it.
📋 IN THIS ISSUE
🧬 Embryo scoring for intelligence is here. Let’s talk about that a bit.
💡 What questions are patients taking to the internet
🐝 A fertility clinic sold for $760k last week
🧬 RESEARCH
Should we score embryos for IQ?
A new fertility tech lets IVF patients rank their embryos for traits like intelligence, depression risk and heart disease. It's called polygenic testing – or PGT-P – and it's already in more than 100 US clinics.
The science isn’t perfect. For example, it seems to work better for people with European ancestry. Right now the American Society for Reproductive Medicine says it’s not ready for clinical use and the UK, Germany and France have banned the technology outright. And no Canadian clinic offers PGT-P to date.
So what: Canadian fertility patients are in a lot of online support groups with American patients and they’ll hear of this soon. Clinics in Canada should have a position on this before this comes up with a patient.
💡 FROM THE HIVE
Good news and bad news about
This week, we looked at some public fertility support groups to see what patients are searching for online. Thousands of anonymous posts matched what we have been hearing in our interviews with various fertility patients in Ontario. The questions aren't medical. They're about process, communication and systems. The stuff clinics could fix tomorrow.
Three themes kept coming up:
Phones. Patients call on Day 1 of their cycle for time-sensitive testing and nobody calls back. It's the weekend, they freak out they may be ruining their chances this cycle, so they're asking strangers on the internet what to do next.
Expectations. Patients don't know a different doctor might do their retrieval. They're surprised "funded cycle" doesn't mean free. Their protocol looks nothing like what someone else described. These aren't knowledge gaps – they're intake and communication gaps.
Transparency. Which clinics are OHIP-funded? How do you switch clinics mid-treatment? What does it actually cost? Patients are crowdsourcing answers that should be on a clinic's website.
None of this needs new tech and we also know clinics are slammed. But better communication is better for every relationship, including between clinics and patients.
🐝 THE BUZZ BOARD
🤝 An Indianapolis fertility clinic just sold for $760k in cash and stock. Not a bad price for a clinic doing $1mil in annual revenue.
📊 THE COUNT
18,300
The number of Ontarians on wait lists for publicly funded IVF as of late 2025. The province committed $250mil to cut them. It's early but we’ll report back next time there is a meaningful upate.
Have a story tip, a strong opinion or a question you want us to dig into? Hit reply – we read everything.
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– Violet @ The Buzz 🐝