For decades, IVF has felt like medicine stuck in amber—expensive, exhausting, and punishingly hard on women’s bodies. Hormone injections, egg harvesting, endless cycles of hope and disappointment: the emotional toll has always outweighed the technological progress.
Now, a young biotech named Gameto is dragging fertility treatment into the 21st century with a radical shift: maturing eggs outside the body using lab-grown ovarian support cells built from stem cells. It’s not science fiction—it’s already produced a live human birth.
Their system, called Fertilo, doesn’t just replace hormone shots with petri dishes; it changes the rules of the game. Instead of flooding a woman’s body with drugs to coax out usable eggs, scientists use iPSC-derived ovarian cells to create a nurturing environment in vitro, coaxing immature eggs to maturity with precision biology. It’s IVF unplugged from the body—cleaner, faster, and potentially accessible to millions more families worldwide.
Gameto just raised $44 million to push Fertilo through its final Phase III trials. If they succeed, this could mark the first major overhaul of reproductive medicine since IVF was invented in the 1970s. And this is just the start: their second program, Ameno, uses the same technology to re-engineer menopause itself—turning what was once a sudden hormonal crash into a controlled, gradual transition. Imagine pressing pause on menopause, or at least softening its edge.
What’s most remarkable is that all of this is being done not by Big Pharma giants but by a startup barely four years old, led by scientists who were still in the lab just a few years ago. If Fertilo makes it across the regulatory finish line, infertility treatment won’t just be modernized—it will be reimagined.
This isn’t just about helping families conceive—it’s about rewriting the biology of reproduction itself. From egg freezing to menopause, Gameto is forcing us to ask a question we’ve never been able to ask before: what if fertility and reproductive health were no longer at the mercy of time?
