The science of in vitro fertilization (IVF) has not advanced much in the last 20 years, but a small public company is trying to change all that. A presentation by the CFO of OvaScience, to a Thursday morning meeting of the Boston Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth, described innovative programs in place or in development to improve the surprisingly low success rate of such procedures.

First, some statistical orientation. World-wide, 40,000,000 women per year seek medical advice and treatment for fertility issues. Of those, something under 2,000,000 per year undergo IVF (2012 statistic). Surprisingly, only about 11% or 12% of that number is in North America; the largest gross market is in Europe, and the largest single market is in Japan.

Fertility falls off rapidly in the 30s, and is really low by the time a woman turns 40. The success of IVF in this population is generally in the upper 20% range, although Japan for a variety of reasons is in the 17% to 18% range (perhaps because women tend to work longer there and start families later).

OvaScience is operating in 6 countries (not the United States) utilizing technologies which work only by utilization of a woman’s own body. The currently operant procedure is to augment the health of an older woman’s egg cells by extracting mitochondria from cells in the ovarian wall (cortex) and injecting it into active eggs within the ovary itself; mitochondria is sometimes described as the “engine” which provides energy to a given cell.

Future therapies being explored include replanting young cells in their entity from the cortex into the center of the ovary, and growing eggs from the cortex entirely in vitro (outside the human body).

Why no operations in the United States? While there are some regulatory issues involving, inevitably, the FDA (which unlike other countries does not have a dedicated function to fertility), the largest reason is “religious objection.”