Ferring拟最高13.825亿美元收购私营卵子冷冻公司Gameto，交易双方均无直接可交易股票

Ferring Pharmaceuticals has signed a $1.4 billion deal to buy Gameto Inc., a biotech company best known for its product that aims to improve egg freezing for women.

Privately held Ferring is a Swiss maker of drugs used for in-vitro fertilization and reproductive medicine. It’s betting that with its global access to fertility clinics and pharmaceutical distribution, it will be able to popularize Gameto’s therapy if it receives approval from the US Food and Drug Administration.

“We have very strong confidence that the FDA will approve it,” Ferring Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Jean‑Frédéric Paulsen said in an interview. “That’s why we’re doing the deal.”

The fertility treatment IVF requires women to inject medication into their abdomens for as long as two weeks, forcing the body to mature as many eggs as possible before they can be extracted and frozen or combined with sperm to make an embryo. The process can be physically and emotionally taxing and is not medically advised for some people.

Gameto aims to improve on an alternative technique: in-vitro maturation, which involves extracting immature eggs and growing them outside the body. Historically, that method hasn’t been as effective as IVF. But Gameto’s Fertilo uses stem cells bioengineered as ovarian support cells to increase the odds. The therapy, which requires just one or two injections, is in Phase 3 clinical trials with over 320 patients, said Dina Turner, co-founder and CEO of Gameto.

Turner and Paulsen said they believe the market for fertility treatment is still nascent in the US, where IVF contributes to fewer than 3% of births, compared with countries like Denmark, Korea and Spain, where more than 10% of babies are conceived with medical assistance. Because Fertilo is easier for the patients, more people may try it or combine it with other treatments. “The market is just enormous in terms of the growth potential in the US, still,” Paulsen said.

Read More: Gameto Raises $44 Million to Test Egg-Freezing Therapy in US

The deal was necessary in part because of Ferring’s experience working on new therapies, Turner said. “There’s a lot of infrastructure and compliance and sales and education work,” she said. “Launching a novel treatment properly and reaching patients who actually want to use it and doctors who want to learn about it is a big effort.”

The total deal value is “subject to development, regulatory and commercial milestones,” Ferring said in a statement on Tuesday. After the deal closes, Turner will stay on as an adviser. Gameto has been working on other applications for the engineered support cells, including for menopausal women. Those techniques will be incubated in Ferring’s venture arm, potentially as a new company.

Interest in women’s health — historically under studied and underfunded — has heated up among pharmaceutical companies, driven in part by the commercial success of GLP-1 weight loss drugs among women. Eli Lilly & Co. and rival Novo Nordisk A/S have been studying how their drugs affect women across different stages of life, including during and after menopause, when changes in weight, metabolism and bone health can converge.

Read More: Lilly’s GLP-1 Windfall to Fund Push Into Women’s Health

Gameto, founded in 2020 with major offices in New York and Austin, has raised $117 million in total funding, including from Overwater Ventures, Insight Partners, RA Capital, Two Sigma Ventures and others. The startup’s co-founder, Martin Varsavsky, is also the founder of the Prelude Fertility clinic chain in North America.