Metri Bio’s Ashley Abel wants to end endometriosis.

March is Endometriosis Awareness Month.

In 2022, while Ashley Abel was earning her doctorate at Yale University, she realized that most of the research she had read involved mice. And the laboratory research she conducted on early embryos also included mice.

Lab rats have no shade, but they don’t menstruate. So when you consider all the ways that endometrial conditions like endometriosis and the menstrual cycle can affect the body, mouse models don’t exactly work.

That gave Abel an idea. In 2024, Abel and co-founders Dr. Berna Sozen and Dr. Kathy Potts launched Metri Bio, a biotechnology company pioneering new treatments for endometrial disease.

Currently, the Metri Bio team is focused on endometriosis, the causes of the disease, and potential treatments to treat endometriosis.

We spoke with Abel about Metri Bio’s goals and the research that brought former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden to the lab.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

HealthyWomen: Tell us more about how you started Metri Bio.

Ashley Abel: It was when I was pursuing my Ph.D. In the Sozen Lab at Yale, we discovered deviations in signaling pathways between humans and mice that are clinically relevant to early pregnancy loss.

At the time, it completely changed my lens to realize that while mice are a great model for many diseases, there are some conditions that are more specific to humans, and that human biology is unique.

It made me start thinking about other conditions that can’t be seen through the lens of human biology.

Around that time, I discovered that many of my close friends and family members had endometriosis, and the condition caught my attention.

I talked about endometriosis with other members of the lab and studied how endometriosis is currently modeled. The study mainly targeted mice that did not menstruate. So it seemed like creating human models to better understand biology through a lens could be another advantageous condition.

HW: Why is Metri Bio particularly interested in endometriosis?

Abel: It’s honestly surprising that there aren’t better treatment options for endometriosis. And I think there’s a huge opportunity in endometriosis treatment.

Current treatment options include hormonal suppression or surgery for recurrence. At a recent patient advocacy event, I met a woman who had had 22 surgeries because laparoscopic resection is not always curative and the recurrence rate is quite high.

We realized that to figure out how to create better targeted disease-modifying treatments, we had to start with having robust models to understand unique disease targets (biological molecules that play a role in the development, progression, or symptoms of a disease) and how to modify them. Because you need a disease target and because mice do not menstruate, this disease is very challenging to model in a laboratory or preclinical setting.

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

HW: The company reproduces human tissue in the lab for use in developing treatments for endometrial disease. It looks awesome and scary. Can you tell us more about this?

Abel: By taking human tissue and recreating it in the lab, we can better understand its biology by having multiple models of the same patient tissue. We want to find unique disease markers that we can target based on what needs to be corrected, and understand whether it works for this patient, how many other patients are seeing the same correction, and whether this can be targeted more broadly in the disease.

Therefore, it is useful to have mouse model systems for many other diseases and various cancers. It’s really amazing to take a mouse that has cancer, look at the tumor inside the mouse, target that tumor, and see the tumor go away. So then we can say that we have good data to say that this can be effective.

I want to thank everyone who brought us on stage and pioneered these amazing mouse models over decades of hard work. However, we are not seeing a clear interpretation of the human biology of endometriosis. Lesion size (and changes in lesion size) are only one aspect of the disease that does not always correlate with the pain perceived by the patient. So how can we capture more information about biology on our platform? For example, aspects such as inflammation are very important to capture and evaluate. That’s what we do with patient tissue. We can expand on that, model it, and through that we can better understand the disease and move toward treatments that we can understand.

HW: Metri Bio has previously raised $5 million to develop a treatment for endometriosis. Can you tell us more about this and what you are currently working on?

Abel: I started this idea with another student at Yale, wrote our first grant together, and performed many of our first experiments. But past that point, the team expanded significantly and the science really took off in the lab space.

At Metri, we realized that we had this amazing technology at Yale, and we wondered what it would take to leverage this technology to actually create groundbreaking treatments for patients. This is a huge gap between laboratory studies and treatments. So what we’re doing is the first step on that journey.

Over the next two years, we are industrializing the platform and identifying disease targets for endometriosis. This is important because there are currently not many widely agreed upon disease indicators in this field.

Endometriosis requires careful patient stratification, and many groups have been doing this over the years and are beginning to understand the different subtypes of the disease and how certain lesion types are differentiated from others. The whole goal of pre-seeding is to walk away with these powerful disease targets in hand that we can show are reproducible for huge numbers of patients.

HW: When many people think of the state of their uterus, they tend to think of the possibility of pregnancy. Aside from its impact 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. There were people around me who were unable to get pregnant due to endometriosis, and I realized that endometriosis is a systemic disease rather than a uterine disease itself.

Let me highlight a few aspects of what this means for people with endometriosis. Approximately one-third of patients experience infertility or infertility, but pain is a wider reason for patients to visit hospitals. Pain during menstruation, pain during intercourse, and general pelvic pain can be quite debilitating.

There are also several side effects associated with this condition, such as increased cardiovascular risk. So if you look at endometriosis, it doesn’t just affect your ability to have children, it actually affects your daily life. Living with chronic pain is incredibly difficult, and unfortunately, medications are often just a Band-Aid.

At Metri, we are starting with endometriosis, but in the future there are several diseases we believe have the potential to be modeled with this platform, including uterine fibroids.

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

Abel: We’re really putting our heads down and executing in the lab. I think we all have a tremendous responsibility to provide patients with the highest quality science and actually take action as quickly as possible. This is no small task.

We have a small team, but everyone is an absolute superstar in their own right. And we’re really focused on hitting that milestone this year to make sure we have the best science possible. Even if you work at lightning speed, it just takes time.

We were recently accepted as a founding company for the Milken Institute Women’s Health Network, chaired by former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden. She visited Metri earlier this year.

Former First Lady Jill Biden at Metri Bio, 2026

HW: Congratulations on being selected as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Healthcare. How do you plan to get beyond that when you turn 40?

Abel: Oh my goodness — that’s a good question. I was truly honored to receive that recognition. When I finished my doctorate and was at a crossroads. As I was thinking about what to do next in my life, I started this company because I realized that the reason I became a scientist was to bring new medicines to patients. In a traditional Ph.D. When you get an education, you learn a lot about the scientific rigor required to discover things that literally no one could have figured out before. But the reason I decided to start Metri is because I know that if I dedicate the next few decades to this project, it will give me a lifetime of satisfaction. Even if we find the target and develop a drug that helps only 1% of patients. I don’t know if that will happen until I’m 40, but hopefully in 10 years. Seeing true disease improvement will be the achievement of my lifetime.