Noor Siddiqui of Orchid Health — The Future of Families, Conception, and Genetics

CAMERON WIESE: Welcome to the Build the Future podcast. My name is Cameron Wiese and I'm your host. I've always been fascinated by the ideas and sentiment that drove American culture in the 1960s with the space race. A culture galvanized to dream about the possibilities of tomorrow, whether it's food, transportation, cities, biology, or anything else. It was this cultural mindset rooted in optimism that the world tomorrow would be better than the world today. A mindset where people were compelled to build things, and I quote JFK, not because they were easy, but because they were hard. It's this desire to build and to dream that seems to have been lost, and something we're here to bring back. With Build the Future, we're here to promote the ideas and stories of those who see how the future can be better and promote their plans to get us there. It's our mission to get you to dream about the possibilities of tomorrow, to dream about the future that you want to live in, and inspire you to go build. Today, we're talking to Noor Siddiqui, the CEO of Orchid Health.

CAMERON WIESE: At Orchid, they're developing advanced preconceptions screening to help families safely and naturally mitigate their family's genetic predispositions. In doing so, they're building a feature where couples can have the healthiest child possible. Let's jump right in. Noor, thank you so much for coming to Build the Future. I'm very, very stoked to have you here

SPEAKER UNCLEAR: today. Thanks so much for having me. Tell me about the future you're building at Orchid.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: What's the vision? Yeah, so the vision at Orchid is actually pretty simple. We want every couple to be able to have a healthy baby. And right now what's going on is actually pretty crazy. So people are going into the most consequential, important decision of their entire life, you know, having a child completely blind. So they have no visibility into their own genetic predispositions, and what they might pass on to their child. So what we've developed at Orchid is a new type of genetic test that allows couples to, you know, just, you know, submit us live a sample and and get a report back that alerts them about what genetic risks they're passing on to their child for the most common conditions. So things like schizophrenia, heart disease, diabetes, you know, all of the top conditions that parents are worried about. And instead of most genetic tests where, you know, there's not really something that you can do about it, there is an actionable component to Orchid's results. So, and that actionable component is

NOOR SIDDIQUI: embryo testing. So we can actually quantify the level of genetic risk for each embryo and help that couple that previously, you know, couldn't conceive confidently, you know, was worried about passing on these genetic risks. They can actually take action and mitigate risks for their family And so that's what we're really excited about at Orca, this possibility of a future where, you know, life doesn't have to be interrupted by disease, like this possibility that parents can actually help their children have, you know, a better chance at a healthy life.

CAMERON WIESE: How does this contrast to what's available today?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: The tests that exist today in the preconception or reproductive setting are looking at really rare conditions. So they're called carrier screening, and they're looking at recessive, really rare recessive conditions where it's sort of a one in 1000 or one in a million chance that an individual partner is a carrier. And the other thing is that actually both partners have to be carriers in order since it's a recessive condition for the child to have a chance of inheriting the disease. And I think it's, you know, it's really impressive and amazing that these tests have caught on because now for this, like very small fraction of people who are carriers, they can be alerted early and they can take action. They can go through IVF and they can prevent their child from getting cystic fibrosis. They can prevent their child from getting spinal muscular atrophy, these really major destructive conditions that can really result in a child actually not even making it to adulthood. So we're basically building on the

NOOR SIDDIQUI: progress that's been made in genetics over the last decade. So a decade ago when these carrier screens and old school genetic tests came online, that's all we knew. All we knew was here's a couple thousand rare mutations that cause really severe diseases. But now over the last decade, we've built up these datasets where we have hundreds of thousands of sequence individuals paired with physician verified diagnoses. And what that dataset allows us to do is for the first time ever to sort of realize the goal of genomic medicine, which is that now we can measure genetic susceptibility for the most common conditions. And the diseases that you and I care about, things like heart disease and schizophrenia and diabetes, they're not driven by a single gene, right? They're driven by millions of genes, millions of variants across the genome. And it wasn't possible 10 years ago to be able to build accurate models because we didn't have enough sequence individuals to say, okay, we're going to run a study and find out these are the variants that are actually a correlator connected to the disease.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So now that we have that data, now that we can build these, you know, highly predictive models, I think that the most valuable and high yield use case is, is to give that information to parents so that when they're taking this big step of bringing a new human into the world, they can prevent them from inheriting those same variants that led to disease in their own family.

CAMERON WIESE: So taking this newfound technologies, newfound developments in genetics and kind of shifting the lens from like a treatment, we're going to try and reactively solve these problems to being a bit more proactive. So parents can go in ahead of time and say, hey, we're not sure if we're going to carry if we have for a carry of this disease, you know, if the two partners are, if their genetics combined that like will cause problems, it's kind of giving them yet you're giving them the control to be able to go say, hey, now we want to make sure our child is as healthy as possible.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, just looking at through the landscape today, you have more than 100 million Americans with a chronic disease, right? And it's, it's, well, what's happening to these people is that they're released to a drug for life. And in the best case released to a drug for life, right? We have no cures, we have no ability to solve the root cause of their problem. And that's great for drug companies, right? They're able to, you know, bill you for medication that you're going to be, you know, you're literally least to you for life. But it's obviously not great for the person who's actually living with that chronic illness. So the core idea behind gene therapy is that someone has a defective gene, and then you can inject using a viral vector, a functional copy of that gene. And that's really impressive. And It does help a really small group of people actually have a sincere cure, but gene therapy costs literally a million dollars usually per case. And it's also not a sure bet, right? Getting that treatment, there's people who have really severe immune responses to that

NOOR SIDDIQUI: therapy. So, what I think is sort of in contrast to that, in contrast to drugs or therapy is the idea that you could just never get the disease at all by just having a lower genetic risk is something that I think that has a lot of potential, but has been under invested in, right? So now for the first time ever, since you can actually measure and stratify risk accurately, it's sort of come online as a possibility. And sort of there's been a sort of a convergence of technologies that make this possible, right? For the first time ever, we can actually predict risk accurately, but you had to pair that with the ability on the single cell sequencing side to be able to call those variants accurately in an embryo. And that's also a capability that hasn't really come online, except for the last, you know, I think basically three years, right? There's the billions of dollars that have been pumped in actually by the cancer immunotherapy industry, because they're looking at trying to figure out how do we make

NOOR SIDDIQUI: builds more targeted therapies for cancer. So they've spent a bunch of time on the chemistry and the bioinformatics around getting high signal data off of single cell sequencing. So it's really cool to be able to apply that to the embryo testing space so that you can basically take these two technologies that are on the cutting edge and be able to apply them into a full system where couples and future families can actually benefit.

CAMERON WIESE: So let's dive into that kind of the embryo side of things. So with Orca, the preconception report which kind of gives parents the information about kind of their risks and then the next piece is giving them like the ability to kind of do something about it with the embryo report. Can you tell me a little bit more about like what that is and then or probably kind of what's been going on in the IVF space?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: Sure. Yeah. So I guess just to back up about, you know, what is IVF? So IVF stands for in vitro fertilization. And the way the process works is that women are given hormones over a couple of weeks that allows the eggs in their ovaries to mature and for a doctor to go in and retrieve those eggs and then fertilize them in a dish with their partner's sperm. And once those, so zygote would be the first stage of an embryo that's like day one, and then on day five, it becomes a blastocyst that has about a hundred cells. That embryo, you can take five cells off of that embryo, sequences, that DNA, and then what Ork is doing for the first time ever is returning these much more, like ultra high resolution comprehensive reports on what their health risks are for each of the embryos. So right now what's going on in IVF is that it's basically a beauty contest to decide which embryo to implant. And what I mean by beauty contest is there's this thing called morphology, which is basically, how does the embryo look?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: There's a scale called Gartner grading, and that's what embryologists are currently using to decide which embryo to implant first. And yeah, I guess I don't want to be too negative about Gartner grading. Obviously morphology is a very legitimate way to select which embryo to implant, but for the vast majority of parents who are suffering from a specific disease, they're much more interested in trying to mitigate risk for something like schizophrenia than, okay, we want the best morphology embryo. So basically right now they're kind of choosing randomly. And what we're doing is we're allowing the couple in the clinical team to be able to prioritize based on the healthiest embryo.

CAMERON WIESE: So okay, this morphology, like, what are they actually looking at? Right? So you have all the embryos in a dish or like in a kind of on a plate. I don't know.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: They're literally in a petri dish. I've actually been in the IVF lab, but it's super, I don't you see the eggs coming out of a woman's ovaries and there's the embryologist sort of like fishing them out of a dish because basically the longer that the eggs are exposed to blood the more eggs that will actually atrophy and die. So you have to be really quick about it. So basically you have the doctor in the room like sucking out the ovarian, you know, the fluid that contains the eggs and then a small amount of blood is getting into that dish and then you go into the IVF and the embryologist is like has this cup and is like very quickly fishing out the embryos at top speed to make sure that, you know, none of these eggs are lost and that they can all be used to create embryos. But yeah, sorry, you wanted to talk about

SPEAKER UNCLEAR: morphology.

CAMERON WIESE: So then they have them in the, in these petri dishes. That's fascinating, by the way. And then, and then they're kind of choosing which one to, like, is implant the right word here?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: Yeah, implant is the right word. Yeah.

CAMERON WIESE: Yeah. Okay. So they're choosing which one to implant based on, like, the way it looks.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, so what morphology is, is sort of, so an embryo has a trifecta germ. So basically the trifecta germ is the exterior of the, of the cell that becomes the placenta. So there's just a grading system that looks at basically, I don't want to use too much jargon, like ICM and polar body, but basically there's all these different, there's all these different parts of an embryo and there's a way to basically measure how, how likely it is to transfer just based on like a visual inspection. So they just have, They've transferred hundreds of thousands of embryos at this point during IVF. So they've just developed a system that says just based on the visual inspection, how well is this embryo doing compared to another one in terms of just, you know, how do the different features of the cell look? And yeah, that's, I guess, the TLDR of what morphology is.

CAMERON WIESE: So it's a visual check versus anything that's based on like the underlying quality of the organism in the petri dish. It's like, oh, this one looks good. Let's go with this versus, this one has a, this one's probably going to be the best for this couple.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: There is actually existing genetic testing during IVF right now. So that's called, it's called PGT pre-implantation genetic testing. And, that testing primarily looks at aneuploidy. So the number of chromosomes that are in an embryo, you can think of the number of chromosomes is sort of like, let's say you had a textbook and you just looked at how many chapters are there. Oh, there's like 13 chapters. So obviously in the case of chromosomes, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. So the only thing that that genetic test is evaluating is, are there the correct number of chapters in this book?

SPEAKER UNCLEAR: Yes or no? That's the extent of it.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So basically what Orchid is doing is we're saying, okay, instead of just looking at the number of chapters, let's read the entire book. So we're sequencing the entire genome with this embryo and saying that, okay, of course we're going to tell you, do we have the correct number of chromosomes? But also we're going to tell you what this embryo's propensity is for every disease that we have a good predictor for so that this couple is able to mitigate risk for a disease that either they themselves have or they've seen family members suffer from. And I think that that's a really, really powerful and I think that is super exciting. What we're doing is that we're basically taking an existing technology, existing process and are really up leveling it so that more more families can benefit.

CAMERON WIESE: I want to zoom out on the trend here. Like it seems like the technology in in vitro fertilization spaces like developed quite a lot of last 15, 20 years and more, more families are choosing to have kids later. What do you think some of the the second third order effects of this will be? We now have the ability to preserve like people in, you know, certain places like freezing eggs, freezing sperm, they're like cool, let's have kids in like mid 30s or 40s. How do you think about that? And how do you think it changes the way we will operate and the way we will think about having families?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: I think it's really exciting because it just gives people more freedom, right? Yeah, it can be really stressful. It can be really painful to say that, oh, like my reproductive window is super short. And I think it's obviously especially stressful for women because their, you know, their career and their education is like competing with this, you know, the exact same time that they're, they're actually the most fertile and, you know, it'll be easiest for them to have children. So I think it's really exciting to be able to give women more freedom and just really every couple more choice around, okay, when is actually the right time to start a family? And for, obviously for some people it's in their early twenties, but for a lot of people it's not. And it's unfair that for all of human history, it hasn't been possible, but it's cool that now it's becoming more and more the norm. I mean, we're seeing many, many companies like Snapchat, Facebook, Google, all these companies are covering egg freezing,

NOOR SIDDIQUI: they're covering multiple cycles of IVF. The coverage varies drastically by, not even just by company in the US, but also just internationally, right? So you have places like Israel where they really prioritize coverage for IVF. So IVF is free until women are 44 and you see the highest utilization in the world. So I think that it's sort of interesting how culturally different people prioritize the ability to have a family, right? So in the US, it's kind of sad that we don't don't consider infertility a disease, right? So 15% of couples are infertile. And I think it's unconscionable that basically the people who are able to have children, it's just a function of income, right? So do you privately have enough money to fund your IVF treatment? And I think that that's completely unfair. It should be the case that anyone who wants to start a family should be able to and shouldn't be limited by, oh, you know, you're sort of more economically advantaged than someone else who just got unlucky because they were infertile.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: And I think that that's really a lot of the same motivation that drove me to start orchid is that I saw in my family, you know, some people just get unlucky genetically, right? It's like, oh, they didn't win the genetic lottery at birth to just have great genes

SPEAKER UNCLEAR: that didn't lead to disease. Right.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So it's crazy and scary that you could have a, you know, an errant genetic program just running inside you that just can explode at a certain age and lead to something, you know, in my mom's case, you know, she found out that she was, that she had a degenerative retinal condition that led her to going blind throughout her life. So it's sort of terrifying that you don't control your genetics, right? They lead to these really terrifying outcomes. And when you're having a child, there's already so much uncertainty and the ability to have a little bit more control and a little bit more knowledge about, this is how my genetics was going to impact my child is something that I just think is we feel super humbled and fortunate to be able to bring

SPEAKER UNCLEAR: to families.

CAMERON WIESE: I think on the resources and the timing of families is a really interesting kind of like ideas base to explore. Because on one hand, you could take like a pessimistic view and be like, oh, the reason that all these big companies are promoting this is so that people can stay in the workforce longer and like they can get more resource out of everyone staying. So like leaving to go raise families or like work class. It's like, oh, cool, it's work till you're 40, work till you're 45 and then go have kids. But on the other end, it's incredible because we live in a time where we want having a family to be a very intentional choice. And we want people to have the resource to be able to raise their kids and give them good educations and good attention and love and support. And people are at different points in their lives where they'll have different resources where they're able to do that. So it's an interesting balance. Where do you fall in this spectrum? of like, yeah, is it a good thing that people are having families later? Or is it just a condition of the culture we're living in?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: Yeah, I think it's really interesting how there's always this moral imperative that's put on decisions, right? It's like, oh, is it good or bad? Right. And I think that it's sort of independent of that. I just think that there's, it's actually just cool that there's choice. I don't think that it's good that someone has a family young or someone has a family old. I think it's just super specific to that family and that person. And I think that that's like an orientation that I wish more people had where it's not about like let's look at something that's happening and is it good or bad. It's sort of like really contextual, right. It's really specific to that person where they are in life. Do they have the right partner? Do they have the right career? Do they, you know, it's like, I think that we're so conditioned by society to like take anything that happens and say, oh, is this good or is this bad? Like should this happen or shouldn't this happen? And it's actually more about leaving it up to the individual, to the person who's actually experiencing this big decision.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So I'm actually just for more choice across the board everywhere so that it's up to the individual to decide what's right for them. And I think that there should be less stigma and taboo from your friends and society about, oh, you should do this or you should do that. It should be more up to the individual to decide what's right for them.

CAMERON WIESE: What are some of the other misconceptions in this space? How else do you wish people thought about this? the work you're doing at Orchid or the reproductive space differently?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So one huge myth is that difficulty conceiving is mostly the woman's fault. I think that a lot of people think fertility is like a women's issue. And roughly a third of cases are due to female infertility and another third is due to male factor infertility. And the last third is actually unexplained. We don't actually know what the true cause is. So I think that we should really shift the conversation about fertility. Like, oh, this is like the woman's fault or a woman's issue to something that's really, there's a male and female component. So sperm quality, for example, is something that is really, it basically the idea of testing sperm quality is super important and most people don't do it. And sperm quality actually declines with age, just like female-like quality. There's an epidemiologist, her name is Shauna Swan, and she's actually written a book around a study that she did that was measuring male factor infertility. And what she found was that sperm counts in the West had plummeted by 60% between 1973 and 2011. And she thinks that

NOOR SIDDIQUI: following current projections, sperm counts are set to reach zero in 2045. And that's obviously terrifying. It literally threatens human survival. And basically, we're not totally sure what the exact cause of this is, but what Swan is suggesting is the cause is these sort of these chemicals that everywhere that are found in plastics, cosmetics, and pesticides that are endocrine disruptors. And these chemicals in our environment are disrupting our normal hormonal balance and causing basically various degrees of reproductive havoc in men. So yeah, I think that's something that more people should know about. Like more men should be freezing and testing their sperm and making sure that, you know, when they want to have kids that their sperm is actually

SPEAKER UNCLEAR: in good shape.

CAMERON WIESE: There's always this question like, are you playing God when you are selecting which embryo to implant. What are people getting wrong about this? Why is that the wrong way to think about it?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So I think what's interesting about that response is that it sort of negates or ignores what humans have been doing since the beginning of technology, the beginning of history, right? Like why did we create roads? Why did we create cities? Why did we, you know, start saying that, you know, when someone breaks their leg that we shouldn't just, quote unquote, like leave it up to God to see if heals, right? Like we put a cast on them, we try and fix, we try and fix things. Humans have always tried to reduce suffering and to sort of create more prosperity, help us have longer lives, right? So I mean, in the beginning, you know, our lives were our human life, human life is short and brutish, right? We sort of live to like, just past reproductive age, like 30, 35, 40, right? And then we invented farming, we invented agriculture, we did all of these things to make our lives better, easier, longer. So I think that, you know, in the case of genetic testing, this is just one more step in that direction, right? So now we have this new knowledge of what genes

NOOR SIDDIQUI: are gonna be conferring risk for certain diseases. So it sort of begs the question, why wouldn't you as a parent try and understand those risks for yourself so you can mitigate them to the extent that you can with lifestyle changes, meaning, you know, changing your diet, changing your exercise, going and advocating for yourself at the doctor and saying, I wanna get more preventative screening earlier because I know I have elevated genetic risk. And on the second side of that is like, when you're conceiving, why would it be the case that you're trying to mitigate risk for something really inconsequential like lunch? When you're having lunch, you routinely go check Yelp, you check Google reviews, you make sure that this place isn't going to give you food poisoning and that your friends say that this is the best sandwich you're ever going to have. So why is it for extremely inconsequential decision like lunch, you're super motivated to collect data, but for the most consequential decision of your life, which is having a child, why would you not try

NOOR SIDDIQUI: and understand what risks your child is gonna inherit? I mean, people love to say, diamonds are forever, but the reality is your genetics are forever, until CRISPR and until we're able to have gene therapies that really allow us to upgrade ourselves, like the genes that you have are with you for life. So as a parent, I think that the greatest gift that any parent could possibly give their child is the possibility to have a healthy life. I mean, there's already so much suffering in the world. You can get hit by a car. You can lose your job. Unfortunately, social security doesn't look like it's in a great place. So why wouldn't you as a parent try and do this one simple thing, which is to understand your child's health risks and trying to mitigate the chance that they get a disease to the extent that that's up to their genetics. So yeah, I guess that's what I think about testing.

CAMERON WIESE: One of the things that you've been a champion of is this up and coming kind of reproductive technology space. He told me a little bit more about why this is exciting, why people should care. I'm not in a position where I'm going to have kids. So I don't even think about this. I think a lot of people don't, but you're in it. You're thinking like, wow, there's so much cool stuff going on here. What should people know about the reproductive tech?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: Yeah, reproductive technology is in my opinion extremely underhyped. I think that basically everything in the category of reproductive technology sounds like sci-fi, but it's actually real. So even something as basic and routine today as in-fertilization IVF, it's actually, I don't want to say a miracle because maybe that has a religious tone to it, but you know, 600,000 babies per year are born through IVF today globally. I mean, that's incredible, right? There are 600,000 humans that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the fact that, you know, 40 years ago, we developed this techniques to help infertile people have babies. IVF is obviously incredible, but here's some other things that, you know, sound like sci-fi but that are actually real. So, for example, women who have, you know, issues with their uterus where they can't conceive have actually had a uterus from another woman transplanted into them. And they've taken immunosuppressants for over a year so that their body doesn't reject that foreign uterus, they've used IVF to get to implant a pregnancy and they've carried that

NOOR SIDDIQUI: pregnancy for nine months, delivered a baby and then had that uterus transplanted back out of them. So I mean that's just incredible. It sounds like that could be that wouldn't be possible, but that's actually already been done. I think that's actually, you know, five-year-old technologies is this ability to transplant a uterus in and out of a woman who wants to carry a child, right? Another really crazy advance in reproductive medicine is the idea of the, you know, the headline that people like to say is a three-parent baby, but more realistically, what's going on is that there's a class of genetic diseases that are mitochondrally inherited. So your mitochondrial DNA comes, is always from, is from your mom. So what they've done is they've taken a donor egg and they've sucked out the mitochondrial DNA and then they've transferred the DNA from the mother. So basically this child actually has DNA from three people. So the sperm that has been contributed by the father, the DNA has been contributed by the mother. And then the egg donor has actually contributed

NOOR SIDDIQUI: the mitochondrial DNA that isn't defective that the mother was worried about transferring.

CAMERON WIESE: What are some of the unanswered questions in that space and things that you would want to see? It's like, what are some of the things that like have not yet been solved?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So I think that the biggest thing that hasn't been solved right now in IVF is the accessibility problem. Right now, it's unfortunately pretty expensive, and it's unfortunately pretty artisanal. So basically, there hasn't been a huge number of advances since IVF was introduced 40 years ago. So a huge thing that determines the success of IVF is the quality of the embryology. So essentially, how many embryos and eggs and sperm have these embryologists manipulated? And the more fine grain control that they have, sort of the better your outcome. So that's, it's obviously great for these like really high volume IVF centers that are doing a lot of cycles per year. But, you know, for any new center that's coming up, being able to find these really highly trained embryologists is really going to determine the success of each cycle. So I think that something that's really interesting that's coming down the pipe is the idea of using automation and roboticization and AI essentially to be able to segment

NOOR SIDDIQUI: and select sperm that are going to be more likely to produce a healthy embryo. Basically the idea of kind of making, putting IVF in a box and making it like LASIK, right? You go to LASIK, you go to any ophthalmologist and you have a defined set, a defined way and defined outcomes for how a LASIK machine works. I think that the idea of kind of getting IVF in a box is super exciting because then, you know, for all these people who, you know, want to do it for either disease mitigation reasons or for infertility reasons, you know, have less uncertainty about, you know, what's actually happening behind the scenes. There's less variability between labs about, you know, what outcomes are going to be possible. So I think that's something that I'm super excited about. Another maybe slightly more sci-fi technology that I'm excited about is the idea of making IVF non-invasive. So currently IVF is quote unquote invasive for women because, you know, we have to go inject ourselves with these hormones and we have to go then get those those eggs retrieved that we talked about earlier.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So there's this emerging possibility of taking stem cells. So basically taking a fiber blast or skin cell, directing that into a stem cell. So that problem has actually already been solved. So there's something else discovered called the Yamanaka factors. So basically the transcription factors that allow you to take a somatic or a body cell and translate that into a pluripotent or stem cell state. So that was a huge development that received the Nobel prize. but basically the step that we have yet to do is to take a stem cell and then direct it to a certain lineage. So basically to take that stem cell that could become any cell, it could become a heart cell, brain cell and be able to figure out okay how do we direct this to a certain state. So the state that would be most relevant for IVF is the ability to direct a skin cell into becoming a sperm cell or to becoming an egg cell. Yeah so I think that's something that for whatever reason is actually contentious and the government won't fund it. So you have to get, so a lot of these labs that are working

NOOR SIDDIQUI: on it have to get private funding to pursue that type of research, but I think it's a really exciting possibility so that, basically that would allow same-sex couples to have children that would allow much older women to have children who, maybe didn't freeze their eggs earlier when they were higher quality. So that's unfortunately not something that we're gonna be seeing in the next few years, but maybe in a decade or two decades, I'm optimistic that that technology will come to term.

CAMERON WIESE: In terms of kind of exciting features and stuff, that's a bit further out. Outside of the work you're doing at Orchid and the reproductive tech space, like what excites you about the future? How about the world you want to be living in in like 2050?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: I mean, I think we've made a lot of progress on bits. I think we've made a little bit of less progress on atoms. So I think I'm super excited about obviously what's going on at Neuralink, anything Elon touches is obviously super exciting. But basically the idea of faster transportation, like obviously it's cool to go to Mars, but wouldn't it be cool to see infrastructure in the US that far surpass what's going on in Japan in terms of high speed rail? Wouldn't it be cool if we were just drastically more connected where it didn't take six hours to get to from New York to San Francisco? What if it could take two hours or one hour? Basically the idea of spending less time in traffic, like the idea that basically people get to spend more time doing what they love as opposed to kind of getting lost in minutia. So yeah, I think infrastructure and cities are super exciting. Obviously I think the whole space of biotech and genetic engineering is super exciting. The idea that people get to actually extend their health span. So instead of just putting up with the idea

NOOR SIDDIQUI: that we're gonna degrade progressively throughout our lives that we actually can sort of proactively extend the period of life that we live without disease. Obviously, you know, orchid is one angle at that, but you know, I don't want to negate that I'm super excited about therapies that people are developing, whether that's gene therapies or drugs or, you know, whatever we can do to preserve the number of years that we live uninterrupted by disease. I think what else is super exciting? Yeah, I also think that a lot of this work around, like, artificial meets super cool, right? The idea that you could more, I think you had guests on here who've already talked about the idea that raising a cow is actually like a huge lift, not only from an economic perspective, but on the environment of the idea that, okay, we can still have stakes, but they're just generated in the lab. So yeah, I think all of these like technologies that make the world more sustainable are sorely needed. And yeah, so I don't know, I guess I would say is like, if you're listening to this,

NOOR SIDDIQUI: I would encourage you to like take on a problem in atoms, Like try and solve something that makes the world more sustainable, that helps people live healthier lives. Something that actually touches the physical world. And obviously, it's kind of ironic, right? Because my background's in software engineering. So I've been moving a lot of bits around, but you always sort of admire the people who are doing things in the physical world.

CAMERON WIESE: Where can people find you and how can they support you and Orchid?

NOOR SIDDIQUI: So if you're interested in getting early access to Orchid's reports, we're at orchidhealth.com. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at at orchidinc.

SPEAKER UNCLEAR: Cool. No, it's fantastic.

CAMERON WIESE: As always, great chatting with you and excited for the future you are building at Orchid.

NOOR SIDDIQUI: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

CAMERON WIESE: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Build the Future podcast. If you're building and want to get support, want to hear about certain topics or hear from certain people, shoot us over an email to hello at buildthefuturepodcast.com or follow me, Cameron, on Twitter at camwheezy and we'll see what we can make happen. That's it from us. Until next time, go build.