Building in an overlooked field: Jordan Abdi on egg quality, early fundraising and leading specialists

Infertility affects one in six couples, yet biotech investment in the area has been thin. Jordan Abdi, Co Founder and CEO of U-Ploid Biotechnologies, joined Beyond the Purpose to explain why that gap exists, how he decided to build a company inside it and what he has learned about raising capital and leading a team. Jordan trained as a physician, and what moved him into the field was a question: why does this not add up?

Jordan went into medicine to improve patient outcomes. Over three or four decades, he says, the gap between top-tier and bottom-tier hospitals has narrowed as guidelines improved and lessons spread globally, so the biggest differences now come from systems and from getting new treatments to patients faster. That took him towards therapeutics, then rare disease, where he was drawn to the challenge of making treatments for small markets investable. A fertility project then caught his attention. Infertility isn’t rare, outcomes are poor and the cost is high, yet he found few companies working on it.

Jordan explains the science in plain terms. The egg is the largest and oldest cell in the body, and before fertilisation it must discard half its genome. The ability to separate chromosomes evenly declines with age. By 33 around half of eggs are affected, and by the early 40s it is more than 95%. He also notes that seven in ten couples who start IVF finish without a baby. His aim is to stop that decline and ideally reverse it, so that an egg from a woman of 40 performs as though it were 20. He says the team has shown this in the mouse model, with human studies now under way.

He is just as direct about why progress has stalled. IVF produced its first baby around 48 years ago, and the last major innovation, he says, came in about 1992. He offers two reasons for the lack of investment: the market was once small, and infertility doesn’t carry the mortality risk that draws capital in other areas. He sees both changing, with IVF cycles doubling every three to four years. He also points to privacy, noting that couples tend not to talk openly about IVF.

The founding story is a candid one. Jordan met the scientists behind the egg quality research in a pub in Cambridge two and a half years ago. The co-founders couldn’t agree terms for a university spin-out, so they went solo: three people with no commercial track record, no IP and no experience of raising money. Everything at the company has been built in-house from scratch.

Fundraising, he says, has been the hardest part of getting the company off the ground. Many funds focused on this space invest later, so the team relied on networking. Looking back, he would speak to people sooner rather than waiting to be perfect, and go in asking for advice rather than money, which he believes would have taken them further and taught them more. The investors willing to take this level of early risk are few, he says, but they exist, and it became a numbers game.

Building without a playbook has meant pivoting often. Jordan describes moving the lab to Oxford, only to find construction next door was making the injection needle visibly vibrate, which is a problem when working with eggs. A granite slab didn’t solve it. Tennis balls did.

On leadership, Jordan says that if you hire committed people who share your vision, the work largely does itself. He points to a study suggesting the traits of the best leaders and the best followers are almost identical: transparency, flagging issues early and acting autonomously within their competence. In a team of specialists, he says, the job is to communicate clearly, share expectations from the start and share changes as they happen.

Looking ten years ahead, his ambition is to have the company’s first asset on the market and to build the leading developer in reproductive health. He sees other unmet needs, including male factor infertility, implantation and conditions such as endometriosis, and believes a platform approach could make each new asset easier, cheaper and faster to develop. On AI, he says it has a limited direct role in drug development at his company’s stage but is transformative for operations, strategy and staying on top of information, where he uses it as a thought partner.

Listen to the full conversation with Jordan Abdi on episode four of Beyond the Purpose, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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