What an incredible year it has been for Gameto! As we reflect on 2024, I am so proud of what our team has achieved and the strides we have made towards achieving our goal of helping people build families and advancing women’s health. The team was mainly focused on advancing Fertilo, aimed at improving IVF and egg freezing by maturing eggs outside the body, which allows for the reduction of required hormone injections by about 80% and we also made progress on our menopause/ovarian insufficiency program.
Here's a recap of some of our key milestones in 2024:
✨ January: We presented at the Biotech Showcase. I gave birth to my first son and became even more motivated to help as many people who want to become parents.
✨ February: We met with the FDA to align on a regulatory path of Fertilo in the US and discussed the requirements we need to meet in order to enter our final phase 3 trial, which would be the first Phase 3 of iPSC technology in the US.
✨ April: We partnered with Stacey Bendet, the founder of alice + olivia to launch our "Your Eggsperience Matters" Campaign to raise awareness around female patient experience in fertility treatments and beyond & raise funds for RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association during National Infertility Awareness Week (link).
✨ May: We closed a $33M Series B funding round led by Two Sigma Ventures, RA Capital Management with Ingeborg Investments, Amplifyher Ventures, Chelsea Hirschhorn, stacey bendet, and US Fertility plus participation from existing investors including Insight Partners, Future Ventures, BOLD Capital Partners, and Overwater Ventures . This funding enables us to be well capitalized ahead of our tentative Phase 3 trial and to launch Fertilo commercially in jurisdictions where it is cleared (link).
We presented at the startup panel at STAT's Breakthrough Summit West (link).
We published research in the Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics (JARG) in collaboration with RMA of New York that showed that Fertilo improves egg maturation and maintains healthy genetic make up (link).
✨ June: Our symptom reduction paper was published inScience. The study showed that compared to a conventional stimulation protocol, stimulation with the Fertilo protocol leads to fewer side effects and discomfort, lower pain levels– particularly severe pain that requires intervention– and higher satisfaction levels and likelihood of repeating the Fertilo protocol (link).
✨ July: Gameto presented new research on our product Fertilo at European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE)’s (link) and International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR)’s (link) Annual Meetings. We also published a video publication starring our clinical advisor Dr. Michel De Vos in Fertility & Sterility in collaboration with CCRM Fertility, Brussels IVF, UNSW, and American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)'s IVM Special Interest Group (link) on how to conduct an egg retrieval with much shorter hormonal stimulation.
✨ September: We announced Dr. Gus Haddad as our Chief Medical Officer, bringing his exceptional expertise in reproductive medicine and entrepreneurship to Gameto (link). Gus is an immigrant physician like myself, came here chasing the American Dream and has previously built and sold one of the largest fertility networks in the US.
✨ October: We were selected for seven presentations at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) annual meeting, including four oral and three poster presentations (link). We published our mouse reprotoxicology paper in Reproductive BioMedicine Online, which demonstrated safe and healthy live births with Fertilo across two generations of mice with no adverse effects (link).
Also in October, Gameto was also awarded a $10M grant from Advanced Research Proects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to accelerate research for our menopause program, Ameno, a stem cell-derived ovarian implant that integrates into the body dynamically and reduces both short-term vasomotor symptoms and chronic health issues associated with menopause (link).
✨ December: Gameto achieved a medical milestone: the first human live birth resulting from our Fertilo iPSC egg maturation technology with a little baby girl born in Peru (link). This was covered in Forbes (link) and Bloomberg (link).
We also announced our partnership with IVF Australia, part of Virts Health, a leading Australian IVF clinic, to expand access to Fertilo globally which can now be assessed in 4 jurisdictions (link).
Wishing everyone Happy Holidays and we are staying laser focused on execution to use this momentum and have an even better 2025. The number of emails, texts and interest we received after the first live birth tells us that people around the world need this technology. As a team with skin in the game and true commitment and passion for the field, we will give our best to deliver.
