Dr Helen O’Neill, a molecular geneticist and Associate Professor, co-founded Hertility to bring accessible, at-home hormone and fertility testing to women. Hertility, created with Dr Natalie Getreu and Deirdre O’Neill, provides personalised reproductive insights, from hormone panels to specialist consultations and fast-tracked treatment referrals. In this interview, Dr O’Neill shares how her academic and personal experiences shaped Hertility’s mission. Discussing the importance of empowering women with data to make informed decisions about their hormonal and reproductive health, and uplifting women with their memorable slogan: ‘You’re not ovary-acting’.
Hertility was founded by yourself, Dierdre O’Neill and Dr Natalie Getreu, how did your story begin and what has the response been from your community?
The story began with my academic journey turning into my personal journey. My background is a molecular geneticist, with an undergrad in genetics, followed by a master’s in prenatal genetics and foetal medicine, and then a PhD in stem cell genetics and developmental biology. After obtaining a lectureship at University College London, I began teaching master’s and medical students about women’s health, covering anatomy, physiology and fertility. I found it incredibly frustrating, as I was presenting alarming statistics on the prevalence of infertility and other women’s health conditions, yet there was a glaring lack of supportive technology. Despite the high number of women affected, advancements in technology to aid in diagnosis or reduce diagnosis times were simply not keeping pace.
As a woman myself, I struggled with the idea that I couldn’t find any answers about my own body. Despite having such a strong academic background where you’re looking at the most detailed molecular signatures of embryo formation, I still didn’t know whether I, as a woman, would have eggs that would fertilise to become embryos. This felt to me like a real failure in modern medicine. The fact we can’t give women the tools and they deserve to understand their reproductive health.
When I reached my 30s, the advice I kept hearing was, ‘Just freeze your eggs.’ But I couldn’t shake the question: do I even need to? Is this an insurance policy that may not even pay off? I wanted to make a more informed decision—couldn’t I look at data to determine whether I need to freeze my eggs or if I have time to wait? I wanted data that reflects modern realities, not just generic statistics that can sometimes scare women or oversimplify things. Women today face different exposures and lifestyles compared to previous generations, and it felt essential to consider this.
When we looked for information to help us build what we wanted to build, we saw the data in many cases was poorly powered and based on small-scale studies.
When I met Dr Natalie Getreu, when she was doing her PhD we joined forces. We met one evening in the Institute for Women’s Health at UCL’s bathroom, and I said to her, ‘Geez, you don’t you don’t look good. Are you okay?’ And she said: ‘I’d love to get your career advice. How did you get to where you are?’ And I just responded, ‘It’s not worth it, and shared my idea for Hertility.’ It was then that we started to work together. Then my identical twin sister, fortunately, is a corporate lawyer and worked on incorporation of companies and venture capital, law and Mergers Acquisitions. She helped to incorporate the company and lent all her legal skills giving the structural integrity a company needs.
This began as a clinical trial. I got an Innovate Grant to develop predictive algorithms for gynaecological pathologies. The reason I pursued this was the possibility that a significant number of women facing infertility might be experiencing it due to underlying conditions, like endometriosis or PCOS. If we could identify and predict these pathologies, we could screen these women as high-risk candidates for infertility. When we started recruiting at the Royal Free Hospital, lockdown hit, and all non-essential clinics were closed. We shifted to online recruitment and were astonished—within a month, 7,000 women had registered their interest to participate in the trial.
That catalysed the mission for us. It wasn’t just us as academics wanting answers to these questions, but the women out there who are searching for answers about their bodies and have nowhere to turn.
Hertility aims to bring clarity to women’s reproductive health quickly, often providing answers within days instead of years. What key insights or challenges led you to create this fast-tracked approach to hormone and fertility testing?
We went back to basics. With a GP appointment, you have on average nine minutes to discuss as many different aspects of your health to qualify for a referral. If we were to ask as many questions as possible that can lend to a clinical diagnosis using a digital interface, removing one barrier to entry. Decreasing the limitation of time and dodging the stigma associated with speaking to a stranger and telling them the most intimate aspects of your life, including how you bleed, how often you’re having sex, whether you ovulate or previous sexually transmitted infections. Many of these questions yield hugely informative aspects of your health are quite private and feel unnatural to us as women to tell a stranger, albeit your GP, about.
When we built this, we took all of the international diagnostic criteria and guidelines for as many different conditions as possible. Right now, we can screen for 18 different conditions and embed them within our health assessment. We are using a data-first approach to understanding what is wrong with somebody by cleverly triaging them.
What do you find to be the most common myths or misunderstandings about reproductive health that Hertility aims to debunk?
I think it’s less about debunking and more about providing women with insights into the most basic aspects of their lives. Most women don’t actually understand the fundamental role that hormones play in every single aspect of their life. Of course, we understand it affects fertility and menstruation, but more importantly, it plays a role in sleep, metabolism, skin, hair, weight, mood and appetite. All of these different things are completely controlled by our hormones and it’s about providing women with education about the fact that their hormones are fundamental to our everyday lives.
We track many aspects of our lives, from our skin, weight, sleep and calories, but we don’t track our hormones, which will give us far more insight into whether we metabolise those calories, whether we have a full night’s sleep, whether we can get pregnant or not, why we feel more awake or even feeling cold.
I’d like to debunk the idea that fertility is a female issue. It is not. An exponential percent of infertility involves male factors. It’s important that people or couples undergo this journey together.
The other thing I’d love to debunk is that you only need to check your fertility, or you only need to do a fertility test if you’re actively trying to conceive or you want children. Irrespective of your desire to have children, you should check on your reproductive hormones for all the aforementioned reasons. Your reproductive health does determine your overall health as a woman.
Looking ahead, do you see Hertility expanding into new technology realms, like wearables or other types of digital health monitoring?
Yes, we’ve just partnered with Oura and we will continue to do partnerships with wearables. We are all expanding into every reproductive life stage from preconception to postpartum, pregnancy to postpartum, to perimenopause and menopause, we are already doing this by serving pregnancy scanning, and by serving menopause consultations and prescriptions. I want us to be the one-stop shop for women’s health.
How do you envision Hertility’s role in shaping the future of accessible and comprehensive reproductive health care for women?
We will shape the future by providing women with access to personalised information about themselves through our app, which we have just launched. We are very excited about the possibility of being able to log your symptoms for menstrual cycles, but also through our app, book a clinical appointment and book onward additional testing.
For us, Hertility is a data company. It enables us women to reach a faster diagnosis, much sooner, to understand their own reproductive health. And it’s through data that we have the best capability of bringing and transforming the current reproductive landscape. We have the ability to use real-world, modern women and data insights to transform our journeys to care. We are really excited about being such a fundamental end-to-end care pathway, from triage to testing, and diagnosis to clinical appointments.