AURA fuses AI and robotics to automate the IVF lab and perform precision single cell surgery at the microscopic level.
Last December, while the world wound down for the holidays, Brian Bixon, SVP of Product at Conceivable Life Sciences, was feeling anything but relaxed.
“December 11th was a particularly tense day,” Bixon recalls. “Early that morning, our team began crating and shipping AURA from our development center to Mexico City. Everything had to arrive intact—we’re starting a 100-patient IRB study in January.”
AURA moved from Conceivable’s R&D Center to Mexico City’s Hope IVF clinic and was assembled for clinical operation in January.
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AURA is no ordinary shipment. The world’s first end-to-end fully automated IVF lab consists of six integrated workstations and uses AI, advanced optics, and microrobotics to manipulate cells
on a microscopic scale. “Calling this a ‘delicate’ process doesn’t begin to cover it,” says Bixon. “We built the system from scratch and had never attempted to transport it before. We were in uncharted territory.”
Fast forward to today, Bixon is relieved to have AURA fully operational at Hope IVF, a leading clinic in Mexico City owned by Conceivable co-founder Dr. Alejandro Chávez-Badiola.
“Our first patient will be treated very soon,” Chávez-Badiola says. “We’ve put the system through extensive testing and it is performing exceptionally well. We’re eager to scale to larger case volumes quickly.”
The current study builds on an earlier pilot that produced 21 pregnancies, with a 51% success rate—remarkable for a protocol that excluded genetic testing and was limited to one transfer per patient. “Even with such limitations, the results rival the best IVF clinics in the world,” says Conceivable CEO Alan Murray.
The Principal Investigator for both the pilot and ongoing study is Jacques Cohen, Conceivable’s Chief Scientific Officer and a renowned embryologist.
“This is a turning point for IVF,” says Chávez-Badiola. “We’ve demonstrated that AURA can deliver success rates on par with the world’s top clinics while opening the door to significantly lowering costs and expanding accessibility. We’re thrilled to see it in action in Mexico City.”
Designed to handle 2,000 IVF cycles annually with just three staff members—an embryologist, an engineer, and a lab tech managing samples to and from the operating room—AURA streamlines a process long hampered by manual inefficiencies.
After nearly three years of development and $38 million in funding, AURA has sparked conversations among fertility network leaders. “Scaling issues tied to staffing challenges and maintaining lab quality are structural obstacles Conceivable could solve,” one network CEO noted.
Conceivable is already looking ahead. According to Joshua Abram, the company’s co-founder and Chairman, they’ll host U.S. and European fertility network leaders in Mexico City in the coming months. These networks represent upwards of 60% of all U.S. IVF procedures.
Investor and fertility industry veteran David Sable may have summed it up best in a recent LinkedIn post: “Someday, there will be a documentary about Conceivable’s work, and it will all seem so inevitable in retrospect.”
AURA moved from Conceivable’s R&D Center to Mexico City’s Hope IVF clinic and was assembled for clinical operation in January.
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