The Start-up Making IVF and Egg Freezing Faster and Less Awful

**Dina Radenkovic** (0:01)
We are in a society where women deserve better solutions, the birth rates are declining, and we think that the right way to solve it is to allow people who do want to have children ability to do so when they feel ready.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:28)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Core Memory Podcast. Today, we'll be joined by Dina Radenkovic. She is the co-founder and CEO of Gameto, and I will be heading into a subject matter that I am certainly far from an expert on, which is women's reproductive health and biotech around all of these issues. But Dina is, she's pretty remarkable. She's very young, she's a doctor, she's accomplished all kinds of things in her 20s that would astound just about anyone, and has started this company that is doing pretty spectacular things with IVF technology and potentially down the road with menopausal technology. And it was something I just felt was undercovered and deserving of attention. And with that, we'll turn it over to Dina.
Hello, Dina.

**Dina Radenkovic** (1:34)
Hi, thanks for having me today.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:37)
Thank you so much for coming on. I feel like I'm going to embarrass myself on this podcast, wading into women's reproductive health. This is a field I am actually super interested in. And I just wouldn't say it's my forte. So anyway, I hope you will be, you're here to be my guide anyways. I want to dig in to everything you guys do and your story and the technology is fascinating. And I think maybe just need a little explaining for some people. But I wanted to start in a particular place where I thought it might be a way for people to understand what Gameto is up to. As I understand it, last December, there was a very special baby born in Peru that was really the first, one of a big major milestone for your company and your technology. Can you tell us about this baby?

**Dina Radenkovic** (2:39)
Yes, absolutely. I mean, a lot of founders would say that their company is their baby, but on December 7th last year, that term got a completely new meaning for me and everyone at Gameto.
At Gameto, as you mentioned, we're a company that leverages cell engineering and induced pluripotent stem cell technology, so IPSC for which Yamanaka won a Nobel Prize. We take these induced pluripotent stem cells and make cells of the female reproductive system. We use these young IPS derived ovarian cells to mature eggs outside of the body and change an outdated process of IVF and egg freezing that hasn't changed since the birth of the first IVF baby happened in 1978 in the United Kingdom. What we've had on December 7th of last year was the first baby in the world, it was really a medical first, not just a milestone for Gameto, with IPSC technology where the eggs of a woman were not matured inside of her body fully, but the final step of maturation was done outside of the body, co-cultured with our young ovarian support cells that were derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, therefore mimicking a young ovarian dish and then leading to that maturation process after which the eggs were obviously fertilized, months later embryos implanted and then a healthy baby girl was born.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:08)
Yeah. We're going to unpack IPSCs for everybody here in a little bit because it's a topic I'm fascinated in. But so the premise, a big one premise, an early premise of the company is that you're trying to make the IVF process more convenient, possibly cheaper, and to have some of this, like you just mentioned, the maturation of these cells actually take place in a dish, and to reduce the number of hormone injections women have to have during the IVF process. So this was the first baby that really bore out all this technology that you've been working on for years.

**Dina Radenkovic** (4:55)
Yeah, absolutely, and maybe to go into what is the current process and why this matters. As I mentioned, IVF truly a miracle of science. Since that year, since Lise Brown was born, over 10 million babies have been born with the technology. I'm sure they're in the audience, so many grateful families to IVF technology. But I also do know that women who have gone through the patient journey have had a very difficult time. And the statistics show that right now, to go for IVF or egg freezing, whether or not it's a male or female problem, I think this is important to mention that, yes, we're altering the female patient journey, but in reality, infertility is everyone's problem. About 40 to 50% of infertility is also male-related, and that is only talking about heterosexual couples, right? Even a lot more same-sex couples allow on science to build their families. So this is really a problem that is affecting us as a society. We're having children later. And more and more people need to access these services. Now, when you look at these services, patient journey hasn't changed. For a woman to mature and get enough eggs in one cycle, she needs to go for about 10 to 14 days, twice daily injections of hormones. In today's day and age, these hormones are still urine derived from some women, like marketed today in the United States, or some are recombinant. They cause a lot of unwanted effects, because you're giving hormones to the whole body to act on one own cell type of little tiny ovaries at the back of your tummy, right? So you're kind of acting everywhere in the body. We know that hormones control everything. And to act on women's own support cells. So you're acting on her own support cells to try and say, hey, can you mature more eggs? So, and that's only one cycle, right? And then on average, today in the US, which is one of the highest success rates of IVF in the whole world, a woman needs about three cycles for a baby. And let's remind yourself that nobody's doing and spending all this money and time for fun, right? Like ultimately people do want a baby. So that's where like the pain, the physical burden, the emotional burden, the side effects, the risks as well, like really compound and become like a very difficult journey. So what we say, you know, with Fertilo is that we really change that. It's a disruptive technology that is changing this multi-billion dollar hormone injection market and saying like, do we really need this? Why treat the woman when you could treat her eggs? And because our cells are IPS derived, they're epigenetically young. So you effectively give every woman this young ovary or young follicle to be more precise in a dish. So you leverage a little bit of stimulation inside of the body. With a Fertilo process, a woman depending on her ovarian reserve would still have up to zero to two or three injections.