After decades of being overlooked, women’s health is now gaining increasing attention in the biotech industry. Oviva Therapeutics, a U.S. startup, aims to develop hormonal therapies that can delay menopause as part of the aging process.
Ovaries are the First Organ to Lose Function
Many anti-aging biotech companies are attracting substantial investments. A notable example is Altos Labs, which launched in Silicon Valley in January 2022 with an astounding $3 billion investment.
Anti-aging biotech companies focus on various biological mechanisms believed to be responsible for aging, known as the hallmarks of aging. However, one aspect of aging in women—menopause—has been less studied in longevity research.
“Ovaries age faster than the rest of the body,” said Daisy Robinton, co-founder and CEO of Oviva Therapeutics, a U.S.-based company. “It’s one of the first organs to stop functioning.”
Robinton began her career as a molecular biologist at Harvard University in the U.S. In 2020, she became a resident scientist at Cambrian BioPharma, a company with an internal drug development pipeline and a portfolio of biotech companies developing anti-aging therapies. During her time there, she started building Oviva Therapeutics with the goal of developing hormonal therapies to delay menopause. To fund the research, Oviva completed an $11.5 million seed round in May 2022.
According to Robinton, the idea for Oviva came about accidentally while she was still in academia: “I was researching for a paper I was writing about the future of fertility while also starting my personal journey to learn about fertility and reproductive physiology. What I realized during that time was a significant lack of attention to female physiology in both biomedical research and clinical development.”
During that time, Robinton had a coffee meeting with James Peyer, CEO of Cambrian BioPharma, to discuss this topic.
“When sitting down with James and hearing about his longevity-focused company, I thought: ‘Why isn’t anyone talking about ovaries in the context of longevity? This is a very clear hallmark that needs to be pursued,’” she said. As a result, Oviva was established as one of Cambrian’s development pipeline companies.
Each woman is typically born with around one million eggs in her ovaries, and this number drops to about 300,000 by puberty. With each menstrual cycle, around a thousand eggs are lost until the reserve is depleted, and the ovaries cease functioning. This leads to menopause, which can trigger numerous health issues as hormone balance shifts.
“The decline in ovarian health leads to a decline in overall body health,” Robinton said. “When a woman enters menopause, the aging process of the rest of the body actually accelerates by about 6%.” Additionally, women who experience menopause before the age of 50 tend to have shorter lifespans than those who enter menopause later.
Delaying Menopause to Slow Aging
To delay menopause during aging, Oviva has licensed patents developed at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) by Patricia Donahoe, director of the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories and emerita director of pediatric surgical services, and David Pépin, a molecular biologist at MGH. These patents involve hormonal therapies based on a hormone called AMH (Anti-Müllerian Hormone).
Historically, AMH has been used as a marker indicating how many eggs a woman has in her ovaries. This hormone typically prevents egg cells from being released and fluctuates naturally during ovulation. With a therapy based on AMH in preclinical stages, Oviva aims to reduce the number of eggs lost with each menstrual cycle, thus maintaining the ovarian reserve for longer.
The AMH approach is different from current hormonal therapies for menopause because it aims to delay the process, rather than just address the symptoms. Oviva’s AMH therapies are also distinct from birth control pills because they are designed to intervene earlier in the chain of biological events leading to the release of an egg from the ovary. With birth control pills, for example, Robinton explains, “you don’t have an ovulation event, so you don’t get pregnant, but you are still depleting your ovarian reserve. No therapy has yet intervened early enough in this process to truly impact ovarian reserve.”
By focusing on menopause as part of aging, Oviva hopes to raise awareness of women’s health, a field that has been neglected for decades in biomedical research. For instance, it wasn’t until 1991 that the U.S. National Institutes of Health required the inclusion of both sexes in clinical trials for related indications. Meanwhile, preclinical research often focused on male animals to keep data less variable. This led to a lack of detailed data on female physiology and medications that are not suitable for female patients.
“This deliberate neglect does not serve science well,” Robinton said. “It’s not good for patients, and it’s not good for business either.”
This lack of information also exists in aging research in general. While many companies are raising huge amounts of money to pursue the hallmarks of aging, much remains unknown about what happens during the aging process.
“One technical challenge in both fields is to really identify biomarkers that can truthfully reflect what is happening in the body,” Robinton said.
However, there are now more startups being established to study the biology of menopause as part of aging. A New York company, Celmatix, has assembled a vast dataset on ovarian health and is developing a therapy to protect ovaries from damage during chemotherapy. Another New York-based company, Gameto, was founded by a team including serial entrepreneur George Church to deploy cell reprogramming in a mission to slow menopause during aging.
“The more people involved in this field, the faster we can move towards the larger mission of improving women’s health and well-being,” Robinton remarked.
There will only be more interest—more investment, more companies emerging, and so on—as the rest of the world realizes that there are serious opportunities here to fundamentally change the state of women’s healthcare.
Source: Labiotech
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