Of course they're incentivized to tell you that... we have a fair amount of resources here: https://www.givelegacy.com/resources/ and are working on making them more user-friendly.
In brief, you want to focus on improving your overall health as that's closely correlated with sperm quality. If you have more specific, medical questions, I'd be happy to connect you to our urologist for a short (free) consult.
Wow, interesting, had never even thought about that. I suppose the vast majority of our clients are actively trying to (or planning on someday trying to) have children.
But yes heat-based contraception would be a good bet. Saunas, hot tubs, tight underwear and your laptop on your lap 24/7!
You always want to be using 2.5-3 months to be on the safe side. There's no guarantee anything you do will take effect before then. Happy to connect you to our urologist if you have more specific questions!
Yep! We wrote a post about it a while back (https://www.givelegacy.com/resources/will-covid-19-affect-ma...). I was proud that we have developed enough domain authority to be the #1 Google result for a couple of months for 'COVID19 and male fertility'.
In brief:
1. Theoretically, yes. The testes have the second-highest number of ACE2 receptors, after the lungs. This could explain why men are more likely to get COVID-19 than men.
2. In the short-term COVID-19 is likely to decrease sperm quality, similar to the flu. this we can say with reasonable confidence, but it's nothing particularly scary.
3. We don't know if there are longer-term effects. We've already heard about potential scarring in the lungs, for example. What is the same was true in the testes? After all, some viruses like Zika CAN have longer-term effects.
The fact is, there has been no conclusive research yet, so we are running a study ourselves to try to identify some preliminary evidence.
Yep - this is a great question and I have tons of thoughts here.
First and foremost: sperm quality is an indicator of overall health, and the two are closely correlated. This is both good and bad.
Good because living a healthier lifestyle improves sperm quality. Bad because there is no easy fix to improve sperm quality. Supplements are fine, and there is some limited research to support them, but they are not a panacea.
We brought on a sperm expert from Harvard - Dr. Mariel Arvizu - to create a protocol to assess and evaluate the lifestyle of our clients and create personalized recommendations based on what we believe is highest impact.
We bucket our recommendations into categories like nutrition, sleep habits, etc. and reference WHO or other trusted resources when possible.
We also get you in touch with a urologist (we have one on-staff) to do a consult if needed. He can discuss your specific case and provide insight.
Lastly, it depends on the results of your analysis. For example, morphology (how "normal" your sperm is) can be significantly impacted by things like using saunas, hot tubs, etc. or even from having the flu. There are simple and easy changes you can make to address things like that.
Sperm takes about 2.5-3 months to regenerate, so any changes you make today will be reflected in your sperm analysis after that time period.
Haha! You and me both! The worst part, to me, was it being referred to as "the specimen". I don't know why that always weirded me out.
Sperm can actually survive fine for 1-2 hours hours when kept near body temperature, so a 1-hour courier service is sufficient (and it usually takes less than 60 minutes). If there were any issues, we'd know when it arrived at the clinic.
For anyone outside of major cities, we do overnight shipping with Fedex's biohazardous materials division. We use a transport medium that keeps sperm alive for up to 48 hours during transit. You add it to the sperm, it protects it during that period, and it gets washed out (via centrifuge) when it arrives at our clinic. It's not perfect - you can expect to lose approx. 10-15% motility during that time, but is particularly useful for folks in rural areas or far from fertility clinics.
PS Always love hearing other folks' clinic stories... my favourite is hearing how clinics have their pornography stolen ALL the time and have to frequently re-stock.
Haha! You joke, but there are concerns that COVID-19 might affect male fertility (we are running a study to test this). So it's not the craziest idea to think about preserving your fertility during a global pandemic...
Hey - I hear you, but I don't think that's entirely fair. We are obviously building a company that we believe will go far, and will be around for decades, but we recognize there's no guarantee that will happen.
In a worst case scenario, folks could keep their sample frozen where it is and pay retail rates at those facilities instead of the wholesale rates we offer.
We are real people who care a lot about the people who are using their service, and their ability to have kids in the future. We would genuinely do everything we could to support.
Yes! Well first and foremost, Alyssa is an amazing entrepreneur, someone I really enjoy speaking with, and is Canadian, so not much more to ask for there.
We catch up from time to time and I can imagine us partnering down the line. Notably, we do already partner with major female fertility companies in this space to offer packages for couples (like with Ava Fertility, a very rigorous and data-driven company that helps women track their ovulation periods)
I'll just add that we actually do testing & freezing as two linked but independent offerings. So Lilia matches the freezing component of what we do. A company like Modern Fertility (also YC) is closer to the testing component of what we do.
As soon as COVID allows it... you can keep in touch with [email protected].
PS many of us are Canadian so we get this question from friends. A temporary measure, once the borders re-open, is to simply drive anywhere across the US border, have it picked up that day, and then return to Canada.
Facility backup generators activate within seconds of an outage, and are load-tested regularly for 30 minutes. In case of heat/smoke/motion detection, facilities managers are sent smartphone alerts. There are very clear SOPs for almost every possibility.
THAT SAID, you can plan for all kinds of issues - power outages, natural disasters, human error, technical error, etc. - but you will never be able to bring risk down to zero.
For this reason, we also offer multi-site storage, whereby we divide samples into multiple tanks across multiple locations. AFAIK, we are the only company in this space to do so.
One more thing I'll add to Sarah's answer: in our case, the company was founded by - and run by - healthcare and fertility specialists. We are a healthcare company first, and a consumer company second, not the other way round.
This sounds minor but actually affects a lot of the way we do our work e.g. we ensure rigorous analysis, we take extra de-risking steps around cryostorage, we call clients to share bad results because it's more humane to do, we connect them to our urologist on staff, etc. etc.
I thought it was extremely well written, pointed, and clearly written as constructive criticism. I don't even view this as about being politically correct, but about being inclusive, and creating an inclusive space, for everyone who is thinking about using our service.
I'm sorry to hear about your fertility clinic experience - it feels like they are still living in the stone ages.
Hey - this is one of the best-articulated responses I've read around this topic, so first of all, thank you. I take it to heart and have shared it with the full team, because it's important are actively thinking about this.
I am really sorry to hear about your past experience at a fertility clinic. One of the many reasons we are offering an at-home solution is for this exact purpose... performing such a personal process in a clinic is often times scary, unsettling, and uncomfortable (and sometimes downright humiliating - especially when interacting with people who have intolerant views).
Our brand is something that we've given a lot of thought to and that we continually discuss as a team. We work with many different clients who are using our services for various reasons. To your point, we've found that many of our clients are part of the LGBTQ community and are preserving their fertility prior to starting hormone replacement therapy.
I have personally spoken to many of these clients and have heard similar feedback to yours. We, clearly, still have a lot to learn about our clientele - their backgrounds, goals, needs, experiences with fertility, thoughts around family planning, etc.
I would love to set up an LGBTQ-centric campaign for the community, and I will make sure we do soon.
Thanks again for your awesome feedback! And if you would like to try the service, please message me at [email protected], if you're open to giving us this kind of honest feedback, I'd love to get you a free kit.
We have agreements with our cryostorage providers to automatically transfer ownership of the assets to them in case Legacy ever did not exist in the future. So you would work directly with them and have the choice of either keeping the sample frozen there, or transferring it to a facility of your choice. We would help facilitate this to the greatest extent possible.
We do not yet have jurisdiction options, but I will say that I originally incorporated the company in Switzerland to benefit from their strong stances on privacy, and the "nuclear bunker option" is one that we are serious about setting up in the future. FWIW, nuclear bunkers are actually extremely common in Switzerland, this is a country-wide policy (https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/prepared-for-anything_bunkers-f...), so it's not a crazy idea to set up a cryo-facility in one.
For privacy, I'll start just by saying that I've been a privacy advocate for as long as I can remember, am a
user of Protonmail, Signal, VPNs, etc. I know how important data privacy and am only interested in working on a company that is designed to be privacy-focused from the beginning. As far as I know, we are the only company that is HIPAA-, GDPR-, and CCPA- compliant.
Most importantly, we do not sell your data. We outline our data collection in our privacy policy (on the footer of the website)
Hey there, great questions. Sperm has been frozen for 40+ years and then thawed with no issues. In fact, scientists believe you can freeze sperm indefinitely with no loss in quality.
That said, when you are going through the thawing process, you will lose about 50% of the frozen sperm. That's why we do a post-thaw count and motility check 24 hours after freezing, to make sure we know exactly how much of your frozen sperm you'll be able to use in the future.
By the way - if you are going the IVF/ICSI route in the future, of all the sperm you've frozen, you really only need one healthy sperm per attempt, as the sperm is injected directly into the egg. This is the latest technology in sperm and is very commonly used nowadays.
That's a great question, and one where keeping everything cool is important in both cases.
We get a lot of monitoring information, both on the way to the cryostorage facilities (everything from humidity to temperature variance to battery level of our trackers), and we similarly get daily or weekly checks of the frozen sperm (like manually checking on levels of liquid nitrogen).
We hadn't considered making this information front-facing, although I understand why you'd ask that. What would you be most interested in seeing? Would 'last checked' and 'current temperature' be enough for you to feel it is secure?