How to Protect Your Future Baby From Inheriting Genetic Susceptibility to Disease With Noor Siddiqui

In this episode our guest is Noor Siddiqui, founder and CEO of Orchid. Noor explains her mission behind Orchid helping couples achieve parenthood and healthy babies through genetic risk and single cell testing. We dive deep into the history of reproductive technology. Noor takes us along the journey from old days where birth control was obscene and controversial, to modern days with ultra high resolution genetic testing systems for couples, advanced embryo screening for families going through IVF and single cell sequencing. Understanding genetic risk impacts your lifestyle, your choices and can change the course of any possible diseases. Testing before your child is conceived gives you the best chance of mitigating risk. Couples can safely reduce their future children’s genetic risk for the most common diseases and avoid suffering from similar conditions they have dealt with during their own lives. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/rhyslindmark JOIN OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/PDAPkhNxrC Who is Noor Siddiqui? Noor Siddiqui is the Founder and CEO at Orchid, a reproductive technology company which measures genetic predisposition to disease helping families have healthier babies. Before Orchid, she founded Remedy, a digital health company that helped doctors get instant answers from specialists. Noor received an M.S/B.S in Computer Science from Stanford, taught a class there on Reproductive Technology, and did AI and genomics research with Anshul Kundaje and Sebastian Thrun. Topics we touch: Welcome Noor Siddiqui to The Rhys Show: (00:00) Throughline that connects Noor’s work / From Thiel fellowship to biotech: (02:50) Learning about interests & becoming more sincere to them: (04:07) Hyper about Orchid: (05:41) A teenager wanting to make “baby making” better : (07:10) Gene therapy vs. IVF/Alzheimer & different perspectives: (13:13) Couple report/method & sequencing tool : (18:06) How Orchid works: (21:24) Associations that are being done: (23:28) Embryo report/screening, how IVF works & sequencing : (26:36) Initial PCR amplification with lots of cells vs with only 5 cells: (33:20) Mentioned resources: Thiel Fellowship: https://thielfellowship.org/ Illumina: https://www.illumina.com/ Connect with Noor Siddiqui: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noorsiddiqui/ Web “Noor Siddiqui”: https://noorsiddiqui.com/about/ Twitter “Noor Siddiqui”: https://twitter.com/noor_siddiqui_ Web “Orchid”: https://www.orchidhealth.com/ Twitter “Orchid”: https://twitter.com/orchidinc