How Ashwin's uncle's $130,000 IVF journey inspired him to start a company to help infertile men

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Ashwin Ramachandran is on a mission to help increase access to fertility tests for men and start more conversations about male infertility.

Ashwin Ramachandran first became aware of the challenges faced by infertile men when his uncle went through a diagnosis in the US and spent about $130,000"That freaked me out quite a bit," says Mr Ramachandran, an entrepreneur who moved from the US to Melbourne in 2018.

According to the WHO, abnormalities in either the male or female reproductive systems, or a combination of both, may lead to infertility.In 2021, Mr Ramachandran, one of the finalists in the 40 Under 40 Most Influential Asian-Australian Awards, founded Sapyen, a start-up company that developed a testing kit for at-home semen sample collection.

Robert McLachlan, a male reproductive health scientist and consultant andrologist at Monash IVF, says the "gold standard of practice" is to comply with the WHO recommendation that the semen sample is "produced fresh within an hour" before analysis."The temperature and duration of transport would affect sperm motility … that's one of my concerns with mailing ," he says.

"This is an area that needs a lot of research, which is currently not well funded or not well appreciated by health systems and research bodies," he says.Professor McLachlan says "treatment to restore natural fertility" is currently only possible for "a minority of men"."Often we just go ahead and manage the couple by IVF, which is very effective, but it bypasses the problem of male infertility.

"In India, a lot of the time the difficulty that labs have is that men don't know how to collect a sample ," he says. Infertile men may face extra pressure in reproduction in Asian societies that are "patrilineal", she adds, meaning that males are expected to have male children to continue the family line."For example, in China, there are studies that have already been put in place to educate the older generation and the wider community about what infertility is," she says.

 

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