-I dont know who the main competitors are. I havent come across a device like this before
-For various fertility treatments, specifically IUI, IVF and ICSI (a different fertilisation method used in IVF treatment), the guy provides us with a semen sample. the semen then undergoes a process to ensure we're left with a pellet of the best quality sperm in the sample. dont forget, its normal to have 95% dud sperm in a sample, so we have to wash the sample and put it through various stages of processing in the lab to ensure that the dud sperm are left out. that pellet of the best sperm is what is then used for the treatment.
The idea of the Felix device is that it automates much of this process. What is normally a time consuming, inefficient and laborious task is now being potentially automated. This should save clinics time and potentially labor costs.
I believe MEM has stated that they believe the device might improve the qualtiy of the sperm used for fertiltiy treatments and thus potentially improve the fertiltiy treatments efficacy, this may well turn out to be true, or it may not (depending on the trials), but at the very least the device should save clinics $$ and thus i can imagine its going to be popular. FWIW, i believe that MEM should not be trying to show that the device improves the sperm samples for fertiltiy treatment, i beleive they should be showing that it is no worse. Because at the very least they have a product that the clinics would be very interested in, so if their trial shows that the process is no worse off than current methods but is faster and cheaper then that is a big win. As things stand if the trial doesnt show that it also improves the sperm samples then the market might see it as a loss, even though it wouldnt be. Having said that, if the trial does show that it is faster, cheaper AND improves the sperm quality used for treatment then that is brilliant. Hope that makes sense.
I wouldnt say that IVF is a mature market yet. Perhaps the seeking of IVF treatments by patients is quite mature, sure but the technology and process of IVF is still rapidly developing. There is still so much we dont know. I agree that one might expect big pharma to have gotten on to this before but it wouldnt be the first time that they've missed a trick. Genea recently sold their business to a Chinese company and a big part of their valuation was some of their biotech IVF devices. So theres still a lot of innovation going on and Australia has always been a world leader in this field.
