Klapperich and DAMP Laboratory Awarded MLSC Women’s Health Collaboration Grant

The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center Women’s Health Collaboration program supports collaborative projects that aim to improve the discovery, technical innovation, and/or analysis of datasets to answer pressing life science questions around women’s health. The Center awarded Dr. Klapperich and her industry partner, BioSens8, LLC, $805,660 to support their project “Novel Biosensors for Monitoring Fertility at the Point of Care.”

The BioSens8 technology platform has the potential to greatly reduce the time and cost involved with IVF treatments. Currently, women undergoing IVF travel in person to fertility clinics 4-6 times during a cycle for venous blood draws to monitor their hormone levels. These visits are usually early in the morning before work, require scheduling, can have patients drive an hour or more depending on how close they live a major metro area, and can be anxiety inducing due to wait times. Minimizing turnaround time for hormone test results is absolutely essential otherwise stimulation of ovulation, egg retrieval, and frozen embryo transfer will be mistimed. Mistiming ovulation and egg retrieval costs the patient at least a month of time and the cost of a cycle which can be $10-15K. By having at-home and instant readouts patients will save >15 hours or more per cycle by reducing in person clinic visits.