Midtown fertility biotech Gameto raised $33 million in a Series B funding round to advance a clinical treatment that aims to make in-vitro fertilization more convenient, the firm said Thursday.
The funding round, led by Two Sigma Ventures with RA Capital, will enable the company to advance its leading clinical technology, Fertilo, into late-stage clinical trials. The technology uses lab-made ovary cells to help female eggs mature outside of the body, which could reduce the cycle length of IVF from two weeks to just a couple of days, according to the company.
Current IVF protocols require patients to receive a series of hormone injections to mature their eggs. The injections occur twice a day over a couple of weeks and often cause side effects such as nausea, weight gain and anxiety or depression.
The side effects of the current IVF process have been accepted as the “status quo,” but they don’t have to be, according to Dr. Dina Radenkovic, Gameto’s founder and CEO. The company was born out of Radenkovic’s desire to make fertility treatment less time-intensive and painful.
Radenkovic got the idea for the fertility technology when planning her own egg freezing. She was working three jobs at the time and couldn’t figure out how she was going to fit in weeks of hormone injections and procedures to retrieve her eggs.
“I thought, ‘I am going to get fired, even if I am able to do this,’” Radenkovic said.
Radenkovic and co-founder Martin Varsavsky launched Gameto in 2020 to develop clinical platforms for reproductive conditions, including Fertilo and two earlier-stage therapies that target ovarian disease and menopause.
Since the company was founded, Gameto has raised $73 million and brought Fertilo to market in Latin America and Australia. Now, it’s eyeing a pathway to approval for Fertilo in the U.S. Radenkovic said it will use most of the recent funding to prepare the technology for a phase 3 clinical trial to determine how effective it is in helping patients get pregnant, pending clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Gameto is headquartered in Midtown and occupies lab space at Alexandria Labs in Kips Bay. The company launched out of NYU’s biotech incubator BioLabs.
Amanda D'Ambrosio , 2024-05-30 19:39:13
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