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To be a great company founder, they say you should use your own product. Eat your own dog food. But what if you are running a biotech company developing an experimental fertility treatment? You might be excused.
Not Dina Radenkovic, CEO of Gameto, a New York startup engineering stem cells to craft a “lightweight” version of IVF—one it thinks could appeal to professional women without time to spare. Last December, the Serbian-born doctor, who is 28, found herself at home looking at a needle loaded with hormones. She pushed it under her skin and pressed the plunger.
Radenkovic wasn’t trying to get pregnant. Instead, she’d signed up for her own company’s medical study of how to “mature” human eggs in a lab dish instead of inside their bodies. In a regular IVF process, women inject powerful hormones twice a day for two weeks in order to hyperstimulate their ovaries and generate a crop of ripe eggs, not just the usual one. And it’s an ordeal: shots hurt, there can be side effects and mood swings, and the drugs cost around...