This is a guest post by Richard Armstrong who is an early stage investor in many startups in both SE Asia and globally. Plus Richard has cofounded several companies.
Guest Author: Richard Armstrong
One of the investments TA Ventures has made is into a New York-based biotech company called Gameto, whose mission it is to eradicate menopause.
You probably just thought you heard me wrong.
Yes, I said they want to eradicate menopause 🙂
Now your reaction is probably… Is that even possible?
Well, let’s dig a bit deeper.
Gameto is a company that wants to solve the problem of “accelerated” ovarian aging to improve women’s health. You see the ovaries age up to 5x faster than any organ in the human body.
And so they stop working far earlier than other organs like the liver, the skin or even the brain.
And eventually women run out of ‘ovocytes’, which coincides with the ovaries stop functioning. And this also stops producing certain hormones that control women’s physiology.
Gameto aims to delay this whole process. Perhaps even delay it to forever.
Sounds crazy? Well it’s not.
Apparently their preclinical evidence is showing some pretty clear signs that it is very much possible. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Dina Radenkovic, studied medicine at University College London and spent most of her career in computational medicine.
So she’s been deep in the problem for awhile now and they have been testing whether ovarian supporting cells could help mature eggs and reduce the number of IVF cycles that women typically endure.
So she’s pretty confident they’ll crack it.
If you’re interested in this topic… then I highly recommend you listen to her talk in this interview. You’ll hear her talk about how menopause is associated with shorter life expectancy.
Ovary-ecstatic: Gameto’s Mission to Revive Reproduction – Gameto & Fifty Years
She also goes into how they are partnering with Harvard Medical School and other world renowned partners to be on the absolute bleeding edge of this space.
And this allowed them to raise a $23m round in early 2022, which included my firm, TA Ventures, as well as a number of others like SALT Fund, Lux Capital, and Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong.
And all of this after only being a little over a year old.
Pretty crazy just how fast some of these innovations are happening in the health arena.
