On October 26, 2026, the UCSF Center for Reproductive Health and New York-based Conceivable Life Sciences announced a collaboration and plans for the UCSF Fertility Excellence Center, a research hub focused on IVF laboratory automation, at UCSF's Mission Bay campus. Inside Precision Medicine reports that the center is planned to open on March 1, 2027. It will pair UCSF's Center for Reproductive Health, which the partners describe as one of the highest-volume IVF programs on the West Coast, with UCSF's Center for Reproductive Sciences and Conceivable's AURA platform. The partners say the model is inspired by CERN, putting world-class research and applied practice under one roof.

Why It Matters

IVF's biggest bottlenecks are cost and capacity, and both depend heavily on skilled embryologist labor and lab-to-lab variability. Automation is the main bet for making IVF cheaper and more consistent. This is the third major reproductive-tech deal in a week, after [Ferring's up-to-$1.38B Gameto acquisition](/stories/ferring-acquires-gameto-fertilo) and [TFP's Manchester Fertility buy](/stories/tfp-acquires-manchester-fertility-group). Each targets a different cost driver: drug stimulation, clinic footprint, and now lab labor. For femtech investors, an academic validation partner like UCSF is what an automation platform needs before payers and large clinic networks will adopt it at scale. The caveat is that this is an announced plan for a research center, and AURA's published outcome data are still pilot-scale.

What AURA does. Conceivable calls AURA "the world's first automation-assisted robotic IVF laboratory platform." It combines robotics, optics and what the company calls Physical AI to replace operator-dependent manual steps, with embryologists supervising. Co-founder and CEO Alan Murray told Inside Precision Medicine that "converting an egg into a human embryo is over 200 manual steps," much of it done with handheld pipettes under a microscope, and that "any of them that deviate throw it off track." According to the company, AURA has been used in pilot studies in which more than 150 patients have been treated and more than 1,000 eggs processed, with live births achieved. In July 2026 Conceivable signed a strategic partnership with IVI to bring AURA to its U.S. clinical network.

Who's involved. UCSF's center is directed by Dr. Marcelle Cedars. UCSF's embryology lab director Dr. Mitchell Rosen will work with Conceivable's team. Conceivable co-founder Dr. Alejandro Chavez Badiola said the goal is to "build the evidence that clinics everywhere will want to see." The partners say they will later explore whether the model can extend to a broader network of clinical sites.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-29

Initial entry — story first created.