More and more People turn to in vitro or IVF fertilization to have children. This process can be burdensome, requiring injections of costly hormones twice a day for two weeks to mature eggs so that they can be recovered from the body.
Up-to-date York Startup Gameto aims to reduce this burden for patients by maturing eggs outside the body. The company method replaces 80 percent of hormone injections needed for classic IVF, shortening the length of the treatment cycle to several days. According to recent data published by the company, it presents the promise to generate robust embryos and pregnancy.
Egg maturation in the laboratory instead of in the ovaries is not a recent idea. In vitro or IVM maturation appeared in the 1990s, but the technique is not widely used because it has lower success rates than IVF. During IVM, the eggs are extracted and grown in a special mixture of nutrients and growth factors. Thanks to the game, the eggs are matured with the lend a hand of “supporting” cells of the ovaries from stem cells.
IN Preprint published onlineGameto showed that his product, called fertilizer, led to a higher pregnancy indicator than conventional IVM. In the first part of the study, 20 initial patients received fertilizer to assess the safety of technology. In the second part, 20 subsequent patients were randomly assigned to receive fertilizer or IVM. Mature eggs with fertilizer were more likely that they normally developed, with a 70 % maturation rate compared to 52 percent using a standard IVM.
When these eggs were then fertilized with seed, the fertilizer caused more vital embryos and a higher pregnancy indicator – 44 percent of patients in the fertilizer group became pregnant after one treatment cycle, and 20 percent who underwent IVM. Until now, the examination has led to 15 ongoing pregnancies, 13 from fertilizer treatment and two with IVM. One patient in the fertilizer group became pregnant naturally after collecting eggs and was not included in the final analysis. The study conducted in Mexico and Peru has not yet been reviewed.
“The idea of Fertilo is to introduce a patient -oriented solution, which is really strengthening and makes it easier for people to build a family,” says Dina Radenkovic, general director and founder of Gameto. Radenkovic actually tested Gameto technology on your own eggs– Do not get pregnant, but seeing how well he beat them in their maturation.
The ovaries naturally produce one ripe egg per month to menopause. In the IVF cycle, patients just injecting high doses of hormones for 10 to 14 days to stimulate the ovaries to produce many of them. Shots cause mood swings, headaches, flatulence, and in scarce cases a painful and potentially grave condition called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. In the USA, stimulating drugs range from 4000 to 7,000 USD per treatment cycle, which can be one third of the total cost of IVF. And many patients need several cycles to get pregnant.
Using the Gameto method, patients take the initial two to three days of hormones, and then undergo egg search. Eggs are incubated with ovarian support cells for about 30 hours. Gameto has developed a way to design these specialized reproductive cells from stem cells. “We are able to use these cells to reproduce the ovary outside the body,” says Christian Kramme, chief scientific officer of Gameto.