March is Endometriosis Awareness Month.
In 2022, Ashley Abel was working on her doctoral dissertation at Yale when she realized that most of the studies she was reading involved mice. And the lab research she conducted on early embryos also included mice.
Laboratory mice don’t have shade, but they don’t menstruate. So when you look at endometrial diseases like endometriosis and all the possible effects of the menstrual cycle on the body, a mouse model doesn’t really work.
That gave Abel an idea. Fast forward to 2024, when Abel and co-founders Berna Sozen, Ph.D. and Kathy Potts, Ph.D. Founded Metri Bio – a biotechnology company pioneering new treatments for endometrial diseases.
Currently, the Metri Bio team is focused on endometriosis and the causes of the disease, as well as possible therapies to treat endometriosis.
We spoke with Abel about Metri Bio’s goals and the research that former first lady Jill Biden, Ph.D., brought to the lab.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
HealthyWomen: Tell us more about what inspired you to start Metri Bio.
Ashley Abel: When I got my Ph.D. made. In the Sozen Lab at Yale, we discovered this divergence in signaling pathways between humans and mice at a period of gestation that is truly clinically relevant to early pregnancy loss.
At that time, it really changed my perspective that mice are great models for a number of diseases, but there are some diseases that are more tailored to humans – and human biology is unique.
It got me thinking about other diseases that aren’t looked at through the lens of human biology.
Around the same time, I learned that a close friend and several family members had endometriosis, and the disease caught my attention.
I’ve been talking to other members of the lab about endometriosis, and we’ve delved into the way endometriosis is currently modeled – mostly in mice that don’t menstruate. So it seemed like it was another one of those diseases where it would be beneficial to create a human model to better understand the biology through that lens.
HW: Why is Metri Bio interested in endometriosis specifically?
Abel: It’s honestly amazing that we don’t have better treatments for endometriosis, and I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for endometriosis therapeutics.
The current treatment options are hormone suppression or recurring surgery. I was recently at a patient advocacy event and met a woman who has undergone 22 surgeries because laparoscopic excision surgery is not always curative and the recurrence rate is relatively high.
We realized that in order to figure out how to develop more targeted disease-modifying therapeutics, we need to start with a strong model to understand and modify unique disease targets (biological molecules that play a key role in the development, progression, or symptoms of a disease), because you need disease targets, and since mice don’t menstruate, it’s really difficult to model this disease in a laboratory setting or in a preclinical setting.
What we have achieved at Metri is that we have been able to bridge this gap with these unique human-specific models, all patient-derived and capable of capturing many of the unique aspects of this fairly complex disease.
HW: The company recreates human tissue in a laboratory to use it to develop treatments for endometrial diseases. That sounds both great and terrifying. Can you tell us more about it?
Abel: We take human tissue and recreate it in the lab so that we have many different models of the same patient tissue to better understand the biology. We want to find unique disease markers that we can then target based on what needs to be corrected and understand whether it works for this patient, how many other patients we see the same correction in, and whether this is something that could be addressed more broadly in the disease.
Therefore, it is useful to have a mouse model system for many other diseases and many different cancers. You can have a mouse with cancer and look at the tumor inside the mouse, try to attack that tumor, and when you see the tumor disappear – that’s amazing. Then we can say that we have good data to show that this could be effective.
I want to pay tribute to all the people who pioneered the incredible mouse models that brought us to the stage and decades of work. However, we do not see a clear transfer of endometriosis to human biology. Lesion size (and change in lesion size) is only one aspect of the disease that does not always correlate with the patient’s perceived pain. How then can we capture more information about biology on the platform? For example, it is incredibly important to record and evaluate aspects such as inflammation. That’s what we do with the patient’s tissue – we expand it, we model it, and it allows us to better understand the disease so we can move on to a treatment we understand.
HW: Metri Bio previously raised $5 million to develop endometriosis therapeutics. Can you elaborate on that and what you’re currently working on?
Abel: I initiated this idea at Yale with another student, and together we wrote the first grants and conducted many of the first experiments, but after that the team grew quite a bit and the science really took off in the laboratory area.
At Metri, we recognized that we had this incredible technology at Yale and asked ourselves what it would take to harness this technology and actually develop breakthrough treatments for patients, and there is a huge gap between laboratory research and the development of therapeutics. So what we are doing are the first steps of this journey.
Over the next two years we will industrialize the platform – we will identify disease targets of endometriosis. This is crucial as there are currently not many widely accepted disease markers in this field.
Endometriosis requires careful patient stratification, and many groups have done this over the years and have begun to understand the different subtypes of the disease and how certain lesion types are incredibly different from others. The whole goal of pre-seed is so that we have these compelling disease targets in hand that we can show are reproducible in large numbers of patients.
HW: Many people tend to think of fertility when we think of uterine disease. Aside from its impact on fertility, what would you like people to know about uterine disease and the need for additional treatment options?
Abel: This was actually the first time I learned about endometriosis in relation to fertility. I have had a few people around me who were unable to conceive due to endometriosis, and I have come to appreciate that endometriosis is actually a disease of the entire body and not a stand-alone uterine disease.
I’d like to highlight just a few aspects of what this means for patients living with endometriosis: About a third of patients suffer from infertility or subfertility, but more broadly, pain is the other reason patients go to the clinic – pain during menstruation, pain during intercourse and general pelvic pain can be quite debilitating.
There are also a number of side effects associated with this condition, such as an increased cardiovascular risk. So when we look at endometriosis, it not only affects fertility but also daily life. Living with chronic pain is incredibly challenging and, unfortunately, in many cases medication is just a real band-aid.
We’re starting with endometriosis at Metri, but in the future we have a few diseases that we think we have the potential to model with this platform, including uterine fibroids.
HW: What can we expect from the company this year?
Abel: We really keep our heads down and work in the lab. I think we all have an enormous responsibility to bring the highest quality science to patients and really move forward as quickly as possible, which is no small feat.
We have a small team, but everyone is an absolute superstar in their own right, and we’re really focused this year on hitting the milestones to make sure we have the best science possible, which just takes time, even when we’re working at top speed.
We also recently became a founding member of the Milken Institute Women’s Health Network, chaired by former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden recorded. She visited Metri earlier this year.
Former First Lady Jill Biden at Metri Bio, 2026
HW: Congratulations on being selected as a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare. How are you going to top that at 40?
Abel: Oh my god – that’s a great question. It was a great honor to receive this recognition. When I was at a crossroads at the end of my doctoral thesis. As I was trying to figure out what to do with the next step in my life, the real impetus for me to start this company was realizing that the only reason I became a scientist was to bring new medicines to patients. In the traditional Ph.D. During my training you learn so much about the rigor of science it takes to discover things that literally no one has been able to figure out before. But the reason I decided to start Metri is that if I dedicated the next few decades of my life to this project, I would be fulfilled for life – even if we find a target and develop a drug that only helps 1% of patients. I don’t know if that will happen when I’m 40, but hopefully that’s still a decade away. Seeing real disease-modifying effects – that would be my life’s achievement.
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