Q&A: Ashley Abel Is On a Mission to End Endometriosis

March is Endometriosis Awareness Month.

In 2022, Ashley Abel was working on her doctorate at Yale when she realized most of the studies she read involved mice. And the lab research she was doing on early embryos involved mice, too.

No shade to lab mice, but they don’t menstruate. So, when considering endometrial conditions like endometriosis and all the ways menstrual cycles can affect the body, a mice model doesn’t exactly work.

That gave Abel an idea. Fast forward to 2024 when Abel and co-founders Berna Sozen, Ph.D., and Kathy Potts, Ph.D., started Metri Bio — a biotechnology company pioneering new therapies for endometrial conditions.

Currently, the team at Metri Bio are focused on endometriosis and what drives the disease and potential therapies that may treat endometriosis.

We talked with Abel about Metri Bio’s goals and the research that brought former first lady Jill Biden, Ph.D., 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 was doing my Ph.D. at Yale’s Sozen Lab, we discovered this deviation in signaling pathways between humans and mice at a period of pregnancy that's really clinically relevant for early pregnancy loss.

At that time, it really shifted my lens that mice are great models for a number of diseases, but there are some conditions that are more human-specific — and human biology is unique.

It made me start to think about other conditions that are not looked at through the lens of human biology.

Around that same time, I learned a close friend of mine and a number of family members had endometriosis, and the condition really caught my attention.

I talked about endometriosis with other members of the lab, and we went down a rabbit hole of how endometriosis was currently modeled — mostly in mice that don’t menstruate — so it seemed like it might be another one of those conditions where it would be advantageous to create a human model to better understand the biology through that lens.

HW: Why is Metri Bio specifically interested in endometriosis?

Abel: It's frankly astonishing that we don't have better treatment options for endometriosis, and I think there is an enormous opportunity for endometriosis therapeutics.

The current treatment options are hormonal suppression or recurrent surgery. I was at a patient advocacy event recently and I met a woman who's had 22 surgeries because the laparoscopic excision surgery is not always curative, and there's a fairly high recurrence rate.

We realized that, in order to figure out how to create better targeted disease-modifying therapeutics, we have to start with having a strong model to understand unique disease targets (biological molecules that play a key role in development, progression or symptoms of a disease) and how to modify because you need disease targets and, since mice don't menstruate, it makes this disease really tricky to model in a lab setting or in a pre-clinical setting.

What we've done at Metri is we've been able to fill that gap with these unique human specific models that are all patient-derived and able to capture many of the unique aspects of this pretty complex disease.

HW: The company recreates human tissues in a lab to use for the development of treatments for endometrial disease. That sounds both awesome and terrifying. Can you tell us more about this?

Abel: We take human tissues and we recreate them in the lab so that we have many different models of the same patient tissue so that we can then better understand the biology. We want to find unique markers of disease that we can then target depending on what needs to be corrected and understand if it works in this patient, how many other patients we’re seeing that same correction in and whether this is something that could be more widely targeted in the disease.

So, having a mice model system in many other diseases and many different cancers is useful. You can have a mouse with cancer and look at the tumor inside the mouse, try targeting that tumor, and if you see the tumor disappear — that's amazing. Then, we can say we have good data to say that this may be effective.

I do want to give credit to all the people who have pioneered incredible mouse models that have brought us to the stage and have put decades of work into this. But we're not seeing a clean translation to human biology for endometriosis. Lesion size (and lesion size change) is only one aspect of the disease that does not always correlate with the perceived pain of the patient. So how can we then capture more information about the biology in the platform? Aspects like inflammation, for example, are incredibly important to capture and evaluate. That's what we're doing with the patient tissue — we're expanding it, we're modeling it and it's allowing us to better understand the disease so that we can move toward a treatment that we understand.

HW: Metri Bio raised $5 million dollars pre-seed to develop endometriosis therapeutics. Can you expand on this and what you’re working on right now?

Abel: I initiated this idea at Yale with another student, and we co-wrote the first grants together and did many of the first experiments, but past that point, the team expanded quite a lot, and the science really took off in the lab space.

At Metri, we realized we have this incredible technology at Yale, and wondered what it would take to leverage this technology and actually create breakthrough treatments for patients, and that is a huge gap between the lab research and getting to therapeutics. So what we're doing are the first steps of that journey.

Over the next two years, we're industrializing the platform — we are identifying disease targets of endometriosis. This is key because currently the field doesn't have many widely agreed upon disease markers.

Endometriosis requires careful patient stratification, and many groups have done this over the years, and they've started to understand the different subtypes of disease and how certain lesion types are incredibly distinct from others. The whole goal of the pre-seed is for us to leave with these compelling disease targets in hand that we can show are reproducible over a huge number of patients.

HW: Many people tend to think about fertility when we think about uterine conditions. Outside of their effect on fertility, what do you want people to know about uterine conditions and the need for more treatment options?

Abel: I actually first learned about endometriosis in the context of fertility. I had some people close to me who were not able to conceive because of endometriosis, and what I've come to appreciate is that endometriosis is really a full-body disease rather than a uterine disease on its own.

I'll just highlight a couple aspects of what that means for the patients who are living with endometriosis: About one-third of patients experience degrees of infertility or subfertility, but more broadly the other reason patients will go to the clinic is because of pain — pain during menstruation, pain during intercourse and general pelvic pain can be quite debilitating.

There are also a number of associated side effects with this condition such as increased cardiovascular risk. And so when we look at endometriosis, it's not just affecting fertility, it's really affecting daily life. Living with chronic pain is incredibly challenging and medications are only really a Band-Aid in a lot of cases, unfortunately.

We're starting with endometriosis at Metri, but in the future we have a few diseases that we believe we have the potential to model with this platform, including uterine fibroids.

HW: What can we expect to see from the company this year?

Abel: We are really keeping our heads down and executing in the lab. I think we all hold an immense degree of responsibility for bringing the highest rigor of science to patients and really moving as quickly as possible, which is no small feat.

We have a small team but every person is an absolute superstar on their own, and we really are focused on achieving the milestones this year to make sure that we have the best possible science out there, which just takes time even if we're working at super speed.

We were also recently accepted as a founding company in the Milken Institute Women's Health Network chaired by former first lady Dr. Jill Biden. She came to visit 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 do you plan to top that when you turn 40?

Abel: Oh my goodness — that's a great question. I was so honored to receive that recognition. When I was at a crossroads at the end of my Ph.D. trying to figure out what am I going to do with the next step of my life, what really compelled me to start this company is I realized that the whole reason I became a scientist was to bring new medicine to patients. In traditional Ph.D. training, you learn so much about the rigor of the science that's necessary to discover things that literally no one's been able to figure out before, but the reason I decided to start Metri is that I would be fulfilled for a lifetime if I give the next few decades of my life to this project — even if we find a target and develop a drug that helps just 1% of patients. I don't know if that's going to happen by the time I'm 40, but that’s a decade out so hopefully. Seeing true disease-modifying effects — that would be my lifetime achievement.