Ferring agrees to buy stem cell IVF company Gameto in deal worth up to $1.4bn

Ferring Pharmaceuticals agreed on Tuesday 27 October to buy Gameto, a stem cell fertility company, in a deal worth up to $1.4 billion¹. Ferring, a Swiss drugmaker with several marketed fertility products, did not disclose the upfront payment, saying only that the price includes payments tied to development, regulatory and sales milestones¹.

What Ferring is buying

The main asset is Fertilo, which uses ovarian support cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells to mature eggs outside the body¹². Standard IVF requires about two weeks of daily hormone injections to stimulate egg production. Gameto says Fertilo could cut that stimulation to 2 to 3 days², and that IVF cycles and egg freezing could be compressed to as little as three days¹.

Fertilo is cleared in Australia and parts of Latin America, and Phase 3 testing is under way in the US¹. Gameto said in August 2025 that the product was in use in clinics in Peru, Mexico and Australia, with further clearances in markets including Japan, India and Singapore, and that five babies had been born and more than 20 pregnancies recorded². Its US Phase 3 trial, FIRST, is randomised, controlled and double-blind, and was set to enrol at up to 20 US sites².

Gameto also brings two earlier programmes. Deovo is an in vitro model of the female reproductive system intended for drug discovery and development in women's health¹. Gameto has described the foundation of its technology as an AI-powered organoid platform of the female reproductive system for disease modelling, drug discovery and safety testing². Ameno is a cell therapy intended to slow the onset of menopause, which had received funding from ARPA-H¹².

What it means for the market

For investors in women's health, the deal gives an exit to a company that had raised $127 million since its founding in 2020¹. Its $44 million Series C in August 2025 was led by Overwater Ventures, with Insight Partners, RA Capital and Two Sigma Ventures among the backers². A headline value of up to $1.4 billion against $127 million raised is a strong multiple on paper, but with the upfront sum undisclosed, the share of value that depends on Fertilo clearing US regulators is unknown¹.

For Ferring, the purchase moves it from hormone-based fertility products towards a cell-based approach that, if the US data hold up, would reduce the need for the injections that drive much of the burden and cost of IVF¹. It also gains a discovery model for drugs for women, an area where Gameto has argued research is thin². The two companies will keep operating independently until the deal closes¹.

Caveats

The value is largely contingent. The disclosed figure is a maximum, and the milestones behind it are not specified¹. The US Phase 3 trial is still running, and Gameto had guided to an interim readout from FIRST in late 2026, which makes that result the next point at which the deal's value becomes clearer².