More and more People turn to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, to have babies. The process can be difficult, requiring costly hormone injections twice a day for two weeks to ripen eggs so that they can be recovered from the body.
The startup of New York Gameto aims to alleviate this burden for patients by ripening in place of eggs outside the body. The company's method replaces 80% of the hormonal injections necessary for traditional IVF, shortening the duration of a treatment cycle a few days. It is promising to generate healthy embryos and pregnancies, according to new data published by the company.
Maturation of eggs in a laboratory rather than in ovaries is not a new idea. In vitro maturation, or IVM, emerged in the 1990s, but technique is not widely used because it has lower success rates than IVF. During the IVM, the eggs are extracted and cultivated in a special concoction of nutrients and growth factors. With Gameto's approach, eggs are matured with ovarian “support” cells derived from stem cells.
In a Pre -impression published onlineGameto has shown that his product, nicknamed Fertilo, has led to higher pregnancy rates than conventional IVM. In the first part of the study, the first 20 patients received from Fertilo to assess the safety of the technique. In the second part, 20 additional patients were randomized to receive from Fertilio or IVM. Mûrs eggs with fertilo were more likely to develop normally, with a maturation rate of 70% against 52% using standard IVM.
When these eggs were then fertilized with sperm, Fertilo resulted in more viable embryos and a higher pregnancy rate – 44% of patients in the Fertilo group fell pregnant after a treatment cycle, while 20% of IVMs suffered. To date, the study has led to 15 in progress pregnancies, 13 of the Treatment of Fertilo and two of IVM. A patient from the Fertilo group fell pregnant naturally after recovery of eggs and was not included in the final analysis. The study, which was carried out in Mexico and Peru, has not yet been evaluated by peers.
“Fertilo's idea is to provide a patient -centered solution, a solution that is really stimulating and greatly facilitates the construction of a family,” explains Dina Radenkovic, CEO and founder of Gameto. Radenkovic has actually tested Gameto technology On his own eggs“Pas to get pregnant, but to see how much Fertilo was good to mature them.”
The ovaries naturally produce a mature egg per month until menopause. In an IVF cycle, patients inject high hormone doses for 10 to 14 days to encourage their ovaries to produce many of them. The shots cause mood swings, headache, bloating and, in rare cases, a painful and potentially serious condition called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. In the United States, stimulation drugs are between $ 4,000 and $ 7,000 per treatment cycle, which can represent a third of the total cost of IVF. And many patients need a few cycles to get pregnant.
With Gameto's method, patients take two to three initial days of hormones, then undergo egg recovery. Eggs are incubated with ovarian support cells for about 30 hours. Gameto has developed an engineering means of these specialized reproductive cells from stem cells. “We are able to use these cells to recreate the ovary outside the body,” explains Christian Krame, scientific director of Gameto.
