The Gameto Gambit

Future Ventures is proud to kick off the new year by leading the Series A for Gameto — to support their vision to improve assisted fertility and prolong reproductive longevity by forestalling ovarian aging and menopause.

TechCrunch today: “Gameto just raised $20 million in funding led by Future Ventures, whose cofounder, Maryanna Saenko, says the firm is ‘deeply excited about the prospect of a better standard of care for women undergoing menopause. The suffering caused by menopause is not a biological imperative, and the many complications that come along with menopause, particularly early-onset menopause, can be entirely avoided’”

Deeper dive in Longevity Biotech: “We need a radical rethink of how we address reproductive fertility and menopause so women can access the future they deserve – and Gameto are the biotech start-up answering this clarion call.”

“Menopause drives health decline in many women, leading to poor health in their later years and causing medical consequences associated with old age and frailty. Women, on average, live longer than men, but the gap is narrowing; women also experience poorer health for longer, and when you add in declining fertility rates, it doesn’t look like gender inequality is on its way out any time soon.”

“IVF is expensive, invasive and has a low success rate – to the tune of 20%. Declining ovarian function and negative feedback from ovarian factors cause endocrine changes, and the end result of these changes is menopause – natural sterility with a side order of 34 (and counting!) different symptoms.”

“Maryanna Saenko of Future Ventures, which led the Series A, said: “While there are an increasing number of clinics, therapies, and medical directives to help women address infertility, the success rates still leave much to be desired, particularly for women over 35. On average, 80% of the oocytes extracted from a woman during IVF or oocyte freezing are immature and cannot be used. That means more IVF cycles, higher cost to patients, and lower success rates. We appreciated the multi-pronged approach that Gameto takes to women’s reproductive longevity by first addressing oocyte maturity and then expanding to menopause and more broadly, longevity.”

“We also spoke to Martin Varsavsky, the influential entrepreneur who is Gameto’s Chairman: “We now have the first generation of women who will spend more of their lives in menopause than fertile. The natural step was therefore to address the root cause of these issues by trying to solve ovarian aging. All ovarian aging is premature and while this is an extraordinarily hard problem to solve, it is very much worth solving.”

PR Newswire: “With some of the initial research conducted at the George Church lab at Harvard Medical School, Gameto has achieved ground-breaking results in creating the first human reprogrammed cells of the ovary (granulosa cells & oocytes precursors) to solve the problem of accelerated ovarian aging, which occurs up to five times faster than any organ in the body.

Gameto is building a platform for ovarian therapeutics to initially improve assisted fertility and address menopause with three sequenced programs:

1) Fertilo – To improve assisted fertility and with the mission to eliminate infertility over time for all women.
2) Deovo – To initiate drug discovery and a computational platform for ovarian aging.
3) Ameno – Aiming to make the medical burden of menopause optional.

Based on the rapid aging nature of ovaries, they are an excellent model to study human aging. Gameto wants to synchronize the pace of ovarian aging to the rate of aging in other organs such as the liver, brain, or skin. When ovaries are termed “geriatric” by many traditional medical criteria, the rest of the body is certainly not and this has contributed to the societal and demographic issues we are facing today. Considering human healthspan and lifespan have increased significantly, Gameto believes this biological phenomenon is no longer fit for purpose and is a problem worth solving. Gameto sees the potential to expand its platform to the entire aging market.

‘Ovaries age five times faster than other organs, resulting in infertility, early menopause and increased years of poor health for women. We want to change the narrative of female reproductive longevity and address the root causes of sex/gender inequality in our society.’ said Dr. Dina Radenkovic, CEO of Gameto.”