Daisy Robinton, PhD

A fascinating meeting at the JP Morgan Healthcare confab in SF this week — moonshots in menopause. "As scientists finally begin to unravel what makes the reproductive system age so rapidly, they’re also uncovering a tantalizing possibility: There may be ways to slow that aging down. Not only could this extend a woman’s childbearing years, it could dramatically improve women’s health, staving off the ill effects associated with the onset of menopause. Research has shown that women who go through menopause later in life tend to live longer. The ovary is an ideal model to study aging. Watching the ovaries age is a little like listening to a podcast at double speed, which is why the ovary could even become a proving ground for longevity drugs, a therapeutics market expected to reach more than $44 billion within the next decade. This could have benefits for everyone, since most of the developed world’s biggest killers for men and women—heart disease, stroke, cancer, dementia—are diseases for which age is the main risk factor. Scientists and startups are racing to turn these revelations into therapies that could one day advance treatment for menopause and infertility and perhaps eventually intervene in the process of aging itself. A startup called Gameto has used stem cell science to create a less intensive version of IVF and plans to use the same technology to create better menopause therapies. Two-and-a-half years ago, Pepin, along with Donahoe and Harvard University Ph.D. Daisy Robinton, founded Oviva Therapeutics Inc. with funding from aging-focused drug development company Cambrian BioPharma Inc. Their goal: to turn AMH into treatments that could improve ovarian function and extend life span. Eventually, Oviva hopes to pull off a feat that seems almost unimaginable: giving women a drug that will allow them to choose when—and whether—they go through menopause. At a time when politicians are eroding women’s hard-won reproductive choices, Oviva’s founders want to give them even more control. “I see it very much akin to how the contraceptive pill really changed the game for women in the ’70s,” Robinton says. Human females are the odd ones out in terms of the reproductive life cycle. Most mammals are fertile right up to the end of their lives. The only other mammals that go through menopause are a few species of whales and, depending on whom you ask, some great apes. No one is even quite sure why menopause occurs at all. Prolonging the depletion of a woman’s eggs could delay the march toward menopause, keeping up the body’s production of critical ovarian hormones for a longer period. In older experiments, when researchers transplanted the ovaries of younger mice into older ones, they lived about 40% longer and also appeared to have healthier hearts. Oviva’s first human therapy (rAMH) will amp up reproductive ability. The purpose is to help women going through IVF and egg freezing who are poor responders to traditional ovarian stimulation. The hope is to get them to produce larger quantities of eggs, which could improve the success rates of egg retrieval procedures that are intensive and expensive. Such a drug, Robinton says, would show that AMH’s ability to influence the reproductive system can translate from mice and cats into humans in an already proven market. From there, Robinton says, Oviva can eventually tackle the bigger goal: delaying menopause. To achieve that, the complicated AMH protein will need to be altered further, turned into a new drug that is less painful than a jab, and virtually side-effect free, which throws novel challenges into the mix. “When I use the gene therapy, I’m using the natural hormone,” Pepin says. “I’ve modified it, but only a little bit. It’s very safe.” Robinton envisions a not-too-distant future—maybe before she reaches menopause herself—in which women will have therapeutic interventions that allow their ovaries to keep working for longer, helping maintain the skin and hair and mood and health and maybe even the sex life of their younger years. “For me, the pie in the sky is really choosing when to have the sun set on your ovaries,” she says." — Excerpts from apple.news/AmibOXxr6Qi-StPH4…

The onset age of menopause is predictive of one’s ultimate lifespan. Dr. Robinton: "Our fundamental hypothesis is that ovarian function is inherently linked to healthspan, and by preserving or extending ovarian function we will also extend healthspan." — forbes.com/sites/alexzhavoro…