Biotein’s Vision: Female Health and Aging
We started Biotein to build something we wish we had.
This vision was similar for each of us cofounders: a convenient way to access our health information at the cellular level. To not have to play guessing games based on symptoms and infrequent doctor’s visits. Hearing horror stories from others about heart disease, cancer and dementia made us want to create a future where people wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of being too late in detecting these conditions.
In our interactions with prospective users from all over the world, we have realized how these diseases differently and disproportionally affect diverse communities, including women. This Women’s History Month, we’ve been learning about how many women’s health conditions (or conditions of those with uteruses) go overlooked.
According to McKinsey, only about 1% of health research is invested towards women’s-health-specific conditions beyond oncology. Considering women make up around half the population, the numbers don’t add up.
Biotein wanted to bring more attention to women’s health, specifically from the lens of health and longevity. Specifically, we engaged in discussions around more inclusive biomarker testing: what we could measure in future iterations of our product to specifically give women more visibility towards their cellular health.
After all, female health conditions like endometriosis (which affects 10% of all those who menstruate) can take years to diagnose — to the point that this disease is dubbed the “missed disease”. Womens’ conditions are not treated well currently — they are often diagnosed based on symptoms that commonly overlap between diseases, and they are often trivialized (e.g. endometriosis being brushed off as “period pains”). That’s exactly the gap Biotein is trying to fill: turning wishy-washy, qualitative, one-size-fits-all diagnosis into quantitative, personalized health tracking.
We are currently exploring two age-related processes with implications specific to women’s health. These processes are what we hope to track through biomarkers in future iterations of our product.
First off, we want to examine ovarian aging.
Ovaries, glands where eggs form, age over two times faster than any other organ. In your twenties to thirties, you might be in peak health condition, but ovaries actually tend to show accelerated signs of aging, such as decline in quantity and quality of eggs, and a decrease in the number of ovarian follicles (sacs in ovaries filled with fluid that release hormones influencing menstruation). By most definitions, this would be seen as a condition, but it is often dismissed as normal given it affects so many people.
Ovarian aging leads to estrogen deficiency as well. Estrogen, one of the primary sex hormones and one that is elevated in women, regulates the menstrual cycle and has downstream effects on virtually every system in the body such as lowering inflammation, regulating the cardiovascular system and strengthening and maintaining bone mass. Finally, estrogen deficiency can affect cognition and worsen neurological disorders.
To track ovarian health, anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) is considered the best indicator. In women aged 21–41, serum AMH levels decline 5.6% per year. Tracking and addressing this marker would create more autonomy and control over health for people who do have ovaries.
Secondly, we want to examine aging of the bone extracellular matrix (ECM).
The ECM is secreted by cells and surrounds them, providing structural support. With age, the ECM gets more stiff and modification of the proteins stored there inhibits bone regeneration, causing them to become more brittle. Additionally, lower levels of estrogen can lead to less secretion of ECM by cells. With ECM age, basement membrane (BM) proteins (a sheet-like part of the extracellular matrix, important in providing cues to cells and sculpting tissue) are reduced in concentration, and these could be a type of protein tracked as part of our test.
Women’s health has remained a mystery for too long,whether thanks to taboos, lack of funding, or lack of education in the field. Giving women control of their health through affordable biomarker testing will hopefully extend to all three of these areas. This is what Biotein hopes to do.
While not every woman may go through certain diseases or the same conditions, everyone who identifies as female deserves to understand their health at a personalized level, and not have to go through treatment or diagnosis processes that were not built for them. Women are almost 2x more likely than men to have an adverse drug reaction because drugs are more commonly tested on men.
On Women’s History Month a decade or two down the line, we hope future generations won’t have to stay in the dark when it comes to their health.
