Fertility tech startup brings back a cheaper IVF alternative
In vitro fertilization (IVF) can be a godsend for hopeful parents trying to conceive.
It’s especially important to patients managing infertility, which is defined as trying to conceive without falling pregnant within 12 months. Infertility is estimated to affect one in six people globally.
However, IVF is an onerous and costly process, partially due to the twice-daily hormonal injections required to mature eggs before retrieval from the body.
A less-common alternative to IVF is IVM, in vitro maturation, wherein eggs are matured in a lab instead of in the ovaries. However, IVM hasn’t been widely used since its development in the 1990s due to the method’s lower success rate in producing healthy embryos and pregnancies when compared to IVF.
Now, a fertility tech startup is changing that.
A new dawn for IVM: The company Gameto is bringing IVM back, with updates that increase resulting pregnancy rates when compared to traditional IVM.
- The company’s preprint demonstrates that its product, Fertilo, yielded a 70 percent egg maturation rate, compared to 52 percent from standard IVM.
- Fertilo is made up of ovarian support cells, which are derived from stem cells and replicate the body’s natural egg maturation process.
- With their approach to IVM, Gameto intends to shorten IVF and egg freezing from 14 days to three and reduce the burden of side effects that patients have to bear.
- To date, the Fertilo study has leg to 15 pregnancies—13 from Fertilo cycles and two from traditional IVM.
Patient experiences with Fertilo: With Fertilo, patients would only receive 0–3 days’ worth of hormonal stimulation before the retrieval of their immature eggs. This would mean fewer side effects and less time spent in the clinic than with a conventional IVF cycle.
- Gameto has reported positive patient experiences from their clinical trial. Patients who’ve undergone both a Fertilo and a conventional cycle were asked whether they’d repeat both or either: 92 percent said they’d repeat a Fertilo cycle, while 77% said they’d repeat a conventional cycle.
- Most strikingly, patients who’d undergone both types of cycles reported an 80 percent reduction in overall hormonal stimulation-related symptoms with Fertilo. These side effects can range from mood swings to nausea and vomiting.
More accessible fertility tech: Beyond the side effects and invasive procedures required to undergo fertility treatments, the financial cost of IVF is nothing to scoff at.
- Some countries, like Israel and Denmark, cover fertility treatments to an extent, but for most hopeful parents going down the in vitro path, the costs are in their hands.
- A large chunk of those costs come from the hormonal stimulation injections themselves, which in the U.S. cost between $4,000 and $7,000 per treatment cycle—and patients often require multiple cycles to get pregnant.
- Plus, the cost of these medications is rising, as much as 84 percent over the past ten years.
- The Fertilo approach cuts down these costs, potentially opening up fertility care to more patients.
- Two patient groups Gameto anticipates might benefit from this less costly and symptom-inducing approach are younger people freezing their eggs and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) patients, the latter of which tends to be especially sensitive to hormonal stimulation side effects.
Next steps: Gameto’s initial trial has a relatively small sample size, so its upcoming larger Phase 3 trial will really test whether these efficacy rates hold across more patients. Beyond the U.S., the company’s fertility treatments has been approved for use in Australia, Japan, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru.