An IVF Alternative Could Make Having Babies Less Onerous

More and more people are turning to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, to have babies. The process can be arduous, requiring injections of costly hormones twice a day for two weeks to mature eggs so that they can be retrieved from the body. New York startup Gameto is aiming to ease this burden for patients by maturing eggs outside the body instead. The company’s method replaces 80 percent of the hormone injections needed for traditional IVF, shortening the length of a treatment cycle to a few days. It’s showing promise at generating healthy embryos and pregnancies, according to new data released by the company. Maturing eggs in a lab instead of in the ovaries isn’t a new idea. In vitro maturation, or IVM, emerged in the 1990s, but the technique isn’t widely used because it has lower success rates than IVF. During IVM, eggs are extracted and grown in a special concoction of nutrients and growth factors. With Gameto’s approach, eggs are ripened with ovarian “support” cells derived from st ... Read full article.