Cascade Cryobank is revolutionizing the sperm banking industry with the first Early Disclosure program in the United States. I’m honored to have COO Dylan Morgan join me for an interview to talk about how they are trailblazing the sperm donor industry.
The Early Disclosure Program allows consenting donors to connect with recipient families once a live birth is reported, setting a new standard for the industry. By facilitating these early connections, it helps children born through donor sperm understand their genealogy from an early age and alleviates any uncertainty about future contact for the donors.
In addition to this innovative approach, Cascade Cryobank is dedicated to ensuring the highest quality of donors. They conduct comprehensive mental health evaluations and offer the most expansive gene panel in the industry. With a fresh and diverse donor catalog and a commitment to transparency, Cascade Cryobank is not only redefining industry norms but also leading the way in fostering open and honest donor-recipient relationships.
Here’s a little bit about what Dylan and I cover in this episode:
- Breaking barriers with the Early Disclosure program in the sperm banking industry.
- The journey and motivations behind founding Cascade Cryobank.
- Insight into the screening and selection process for sperm donors.
- Advice for individuals and couples considering sperm donation.
- The importance of mental health in donor selection.
- The future of sperm banks and the impact of Cascade Cryobank’s innovative approaches.
Cascade Cryobank stands out in the sperm banking industry due to its groundbreaking Early Disclosure program, which allows consenting donors to connect with recipient families after a live birth is reported. This innovative approach not only helps children born through donor sperm understand their genealogy from an early age but also mitigates the uncertainty of future contact for the donors. Furthermore, Cascade Cryobank employs comprehensive mental health evaluations and offers the most expansive gene panel in the industry, ensuring the highest quality of donors. With a fresh and diverse donor catalog and a commitment to transparency, Cascade Cryobank is redefining the norms and leading the way in promoting open and honest donor-recipient relationships.
Resources:
Website: www.cascadecryobank.com
Contact: service@cascadecryobank.com
Full Transcript:
Dylan Morgan from Cascade Cryobank joined me for this episode to talk about their new Early Disclosure program, sperm donation and the Netflix docuseries, The Man with 1,000 Kids.
As a previous sperm donor himself, Dylan knows that sperm donors get into this to help people build their families, and connecting consenting donors with families through Cascade’s Early Disclosure program lets both donors and recipient families have a smoother, more meaningful experience.
This program is going to disrupt the sperm donor market in this country in the best way possible, and Dylan and his team at Cascade Cryobank have thought through every part of this process–from donor screening and selection to donor-recipient meetings to ensuring family limits (no chance of 1,000 kids here!)
If you’re curious about sperm donation, this is a can’t-miss episode. You can visit Cascade Cryobank’s website here to learn more about what they do.
Dr. Aimee: I’m very excited to have Dylan Morgan from Cascade Cryobank join me today. You’re here for a very important reason, and that is because of this show that just came out on Netflix, The Man with 1,000 Kids. I said to myself, “This cannot be happening in this country.” We connected over the show because you guys are doing something that’s basically going to, hopefully, totally disrupt the sperm donor market in this country, and hopefully the world. I want you to share what I’m talking about.
Dylan: Right. Yes. We started a new program called our Early Disclosure program, which is, as far as we know, an industry first. Essentially, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to connect our donors with the recipient families, which is long and short of the program itself. Consenting donors, when a recipient family purchases their sperm and reports to us a live birth, have consented to meeting those families and making that connection.
Dr. Aimee: My mind is blown. This is what I’ve been advocating for since I started my practice. I have this program, I don’t know if you know about it, it’s called Freeze and Share, where egg donors meet the recipient from the beginning. It’s just so incredibly unfair that there isn’t an option for sperm donors to also meet recipients.
I know your program isn’t from the beginning, from the start of the search. Maybe one day it will change. But I think this is such a huge start, so that if I were to have a live birth, my child wouldn’t wonder who my donor is. Then the donor also wouldn’t be wondering, “who is going to be knocking on my door in 18 years from now?”
Dylan: Exactly.
Dr. Aimee: Share with me a little bit about the history behind the founding of your sperm bank. What motivated you to start your business?
Dylan: I’d have to point you toward our initial founder, Dr. John Carpenter. He’s a gastroenterological tissue pathologist in Lynnwood, Washington. He saw an opening in the market. We were looking at sperm banking and the sperm industry as a whole, and realizing there’s a significant amount of unsupplied demand and people need sperm because they want to have families.
So, he started doing our process development in 2021, figuring out what it takes to successfully freeze and thaw sperm. Then in 2022, started recruiting donors. Then in 2023 is when I came in and I started fitting up the business to distribute. We’re here now, we’ve had some interest all over the country and with some of our international partners. We’re just hoping we can share with the world what it is we’re doing.
Dr. Aimee: How has your background and experience influenced the operations and success so far of the sperm bank?
Dylan: I come from an interesting background. I started out as a sperm donor at Cascade Cryobank. Not anymore, of course. I’m not selling my sperm at the moment.
I had been working at a brewery. I had originally gotten my college degree in biochemistry and I minored in entrepreneurship. I started a couple of companies. I started a chocolate company in college, and that was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, we opened right about the same time COVID started going around, so we couldn’t quite pivot away from that at the time. I ultimately ended up working in a brewery and donating sperm at the referral of a coworker of mine, and I got connected with Dr. Carpenter. I had the experience in starting businesses and doing operations, selling and marketing things, and so it kind of fit very well.
Dr. Aimee: Nice. You just shared with everyone listening that you actually are a donor at Cascade, although they’re not sharing your sperm, so you have intimate knowledge as to what the experience is like from a donor standpoint, and also from a sperm bank as far as what they’re looking for while collecting and screening sperm donors. Can you just share with us what that is? Walk us through the process of how you guys approach selecting and screening sperm donors and what criteria you think are the most important.
Dylan: That’s a great question. I could start by saying what’s the most important criteria. It’s different with every donor. Number one, we need to make sure they pass through the FDA screening, they don’t have any infectious diseases, and no criminal background. I’d say that’s probably the most important because if they hit any of those marks, then they can’t be a sperm donor unfortunately.
After that, it’s such a nebulous question. What’s most important about anybody trying to have a child? It’s really up to whoever wants to use their sperm.
From our perspective, ultimately what we really want to make sure we look at when we onboard a sperm donor is their mental health. We want healthy, stable people being the people that donate sperm with us because there’s always the question of are these factors genetic or hereditary. We can’t say for everything if they are or not, but we want to mitigate that risk if at all possible. Especially right now, especially in the medical field, everybody is talking about mental health, so we want to be ahead of that as best as we can.
Dr. Aimee: So, you’re looking for donors who are honest and transparent.
Dylan: Absolutely.
Dr. Aimee: Without a criminal record. I’m curious, though, about alcohol and marijuana. I feel like when I’m looking at profiles right now, I see so many donors, say, drink all the time, smoke weed all the time. I would say in the old days people would not be able to be a donor if they said that, but I feel like nowadays it’s okay. What is your stance on substance use?
Dylan: We abide by ASRM mental health guidelines. Substance use, we don’t immediately prohibit it. Of course, we don’t really mind if people have drinks on the weekend or stuff like that. But we do screen out for any kind of substance abuse disorders, alcoholism, we screen out for tobacco use.
It’s kind of a natural screen out with marijuana, because heavy marijuana use can negatively affect your sperm production anyway, so it just usually screens itself out in that case. But we do take care to make sure that we take on people who don’t have any kind of reliance like that.
Dr. Aimee: What advice would you give to individuals or couples considering sperm donation as an option for starting a family? More specifically, how best can they prepare for the process?
Dylan: If you’re looking for a sperm donor, the best advice we could give you from our perspective is, honestly, cast a wide net. There’s still a lot of variety out there. There’s a very diverse pool amongst the entire industry. Make sure you get what you’re looking for, honestly.
It’s a lifetime decision. You’re creating a life. It could last 100 years, so you want to make sure you’re giving that person that you’re creating the best life you possibly can.
Dr. Aimee: I think that leading into the next topic that I want to talk to you about is giving them the best life that they can is your Early Disclosure program. What inspired its creation?
Dylan: We had actually been talking with Melanie Mikkelsen, who is the chair of the ASRM’s mental health professional group. We were talking about some of the insights she had in the industry. She works a lot with a lot of recipient families and egg donors. A lot of recipient families in the past have mentioned how much they’ve wanted to know more about their donors.
There has been a big shift in the industry to go from anonymous donorship to both known donorship and open ID disclosure to some degree. Right now, in Washington at least, there’s the Open ID law, so consenting donors to that are agreeing to release their ID information to the donor-generated offspring that apply to the bank after they turn 18.
We were thinking about: how can we differentiate ourselves? What more can we do for these people? We just looked at this program and we said why do we have to stop at 18, why can’t we just make it sooner? We could give these people this identity information right away. So, we went around trying to figure out why isn’t anybody else doing this, why isn’t anybody else creating this program? As far as we can tell, it’s because everybody thinks donors aren’t going to agree to it. But about half of our donors have. All we had to do was ask.
Dr. Aimee: I love that. What are the steps involved from a recipient reporting a live birth to meeting the donor, what happens from there?
Dylan: We want to make it as painless as possible. Of course, we want to keep track of donors and have a good handle of their schedules, but there could be some time between the report and the meeting itself, just depending on scheduling.
Once a live birth is reported, we go right out to our donor and say we’ve had a live birth reported, it’s time for one of these meetings. Then we have to get their schedule, we have to get the recipient’s schedule, and then we have to get Melanie’s, our mental health professional’s schedule. She moderates these meetings for us. As soon as we can get all three people’s schedules together, we let it go.
Dr. Aimee: Then after that, are future meetings moderated? Do people exchange personal information like emails or phone numbers?
Dylan: It depends. The donors have their own specific list of boundaries and rules that they like to put forward. Things like, “I will happily talk about this, but I’d like to avoid these topics,” or, “I’m okay with future contact or not.”
Of course, there’s more minute details that involve things like Universal Parentage Acts and the states that the children are born in and the families that are created. So, we do have to be cognizant of there are some rules in, I believe it’s Kentucky, Louisiana, where we just have to be a little careful with how we moderate these meetings and what we can say and what we can let the donors talk about.
Dr. Aimee: Do you think that this program will change the landscape in the sperm banking industry in general? Do you see other sperm banks doing this as well?
Dylan: I certainly hope so. It’s just been so easy to ask donors if they’re okay with this, and so many of them are. From what we’ve found, sperm donors get into sperm donation because they want to help people have families. They’re usually people who have had good family experiences. They understand what they’re doing and they just want to help spread that to whoever they can. With an instance like EDP with early disclosure, they have an even more direct line to making that happen, they’re able to be more helpful to these people.
I’m hoping that other sperm banks and other industry members look at our program and use it as a model for their own.
Dr. Aimee: Yes. Are you worried at all that someone might donate to your sperm bank and then they might meet the family, and then maybe the family for another sibling, for example, they’ll try to use the donor outside of the sperm bank for home insemination? Is that something that you guys have talked about?
Dylan: It is. We do worry about things like that, but of course, we have boundaries of how far our business can operate, what we can tell people to do and not do.
We try not to bring on anybody who has donated sperm before. It’s a screening question of ours, of course. If anybody has donated sperm before, they can’t donate with us. It’s not necessarily the same thing, but if you’ve had your own family, we don’t screen people out if they have kids of their own. But in an instance like that, we want to tell them, “You’ve signed a contract with us, and we kind of promise a family limit that we want to abide by. We can’t have you going beyond our boundaries.”
Dr. Aimee: Right. What is your family limit?
Dylan: 25 worldwide.
Dr. Aimee: Okay. Worldwide, 25 families. I just want to get back to the show The Man with 1,000 Kids and just talk a little bit about that. If any of those clinics had done 23&Me or asked that sperm donor for his 23&Me report, they would have known that he had already donated and maxed out his family size limit to clinics all over the world. Do you see sperm banks maybe doing that on their donors in the future to protect families and donor-conceived people?
Dylan: It’s a great idea, I think. It’s certainly a great avenue to take in terms of ensuring your family limit. We have our sibling registry, we have our Facebook group for our donors, and so do other banks. I’d love to have the banks all get together and create a common sibling registry to say, “Hey, we’ve got this guy, we have his name here, we have his name here.” We have re-donors listed already. Of course, how far can you go with something like that? We don’t really want to be stepping outside of our own boundaries.
Specifically, with things like 23&Me, I think it’s a great idea.
Dr. Aimee: I think this donor in that movie, he was creating aliases. You can’t really do that in this country because we require proper government ID.
Dylan: Yes.
Dr. Aimee: I don’t see how in this country, at least, you could be making a name the way that he was as he was traveling the world.
Dylan, what makes your sperm bank different, what sets you apart?
Dylan: Number one, we have a whole new catalog of donors. It’s all diversity. Maybe people are going out to these other sperm banks, not finding exactly what they’re looking for, maybe we have it. I’m hoping so, at least.
Beyond that, of course, we have our Early Disclosure program. We’re the first in the industry to be doing it. It’s a really special program. I think people are going to get a lot of value out of it. Again, growing up as a donor-conceived person, we’ve heard that it’s always a lingering question who your donor was, where you came from. It might not be your family, but it’s your genealogy, and it’s important to you. It’s important to a person to know where they came from.
That’s kind of our chief difference, but some other little things. We’re doing psychological evaluations on all of our donors according to ASRM mental health guidelines. We have the most expansive gene panel in the industry. We do the Beacon expanded panel for 714 genes. I would say those are probably our primary differentiating factors.
Dr. Aimee: I did look on your website and I only saw baby pictures. Do you guys have any plans to maybe add adult pictures? I know for my patients who are looking for a sperm donor, everyone prefers adult pictures over baby pictures, or a combination.
Dylan: Absolutely. It’s something we’d like to do, but it’s not something that our donors are generally very comfortable with. Of course, we want to respect their privacy. We don’t want them to be immediately recognized out on the street. Do we have plans to do it in the future? Yes. But not right now.
Dr. Aimee: That makes sense. Dylan, thanks for coming on to talk to us about Cascade Cryobank. Where can people find information about your bank and donors?
Dylan: Just head over to our website, www.CascadeCryobank.com. We have everything you need to know about how our program works and we have our donor catalog on there as well. If you have any questions, you can always email us at service@cascadecryobank.com. We’re in Lynnwood, so if you’re ever in the neighborhood, come say hi.
Dr. Aimee: Thank you for that. I think that you guys also offer photo matching as well. Right? If I have a patient who is curious to see, because you don’t have adult photos who they would match with there physically, I can send pictures of my patient and you guys will tell me who would be the best physical match. Is that right?
Dylan: Absolutely. Our entire team helps out with this. We all see the donors. We have morning people and evening people, so we all see the donors at different rates. We make sure that we all take a look and make sure we get the best match that we possibly can.
Dr. Aimee: That’s awesome. Thank you, Dylan. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate you sharing about your sperm bank and what sets you apart. Certainly, there are so many things that do. I congratulate you on all that you guys are doing. Hopefully, everyone else will be copying very soon.
Dylan: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
