A new startup is betting that studying the vaginal microbiome — a collection of bacteria in the vagina — could hold the key to a variety of women's health conditions.
The biotech, LUCA Biologics, is focusing first on urinary tract infections, a common problem among women that accounts for an estimated 10 million doctors visits each year, according to the National Kidney Foundation. LUCA is hoping that insights from the bacteria could lead to new kinds of treatments that are a better option than antibiotics, and the work will soon face a key testing ground as it's set to be tried out in humans.
Led by CEO Luba Greenwald, a veteran of Google's Verily, Swiss drug giant Roche and US drugmaker Pfizer, the biotech aims to leverage the work of Chief Scientific Officer Jacques Ravel, who has spent 15 years studying the vaginal microbiome and gathering data around it. Innovation in women's health is"really a mission for all of us. So when we saw this is really a women's health company and approach, personalizing a therapeutic for women, that really brought us all together on the same mission," Greenwald told Business Insider.LUCA Biologics is using science around a collection of bacteria known as the vaginal microbiome to develop medicines for women's health.
LUCA's focus on the vagina and women's health represents a relatively new direction for microbiome research, and comes as antibiotics, the typical treatment for UTIs, are