A preclinical-stage biotech transforming women’s lives through better ovarian health: Celmatix

One in three women have conditions caused by poor ovarian health. Despite often debilitating symptoms, such conditions are still being treated with hormonal interventions introduced more than 50 years ago. The problem doesn’t stop there. Because the ovary plays a critical role in overall endocrine function, women experience serious health problems when ovarian function fails. Celmatix has decoded ovarian function, which lies at the center of a complex endocrine signaling network. Through its platform, Celmatix has amassed the largest structured dataset on ovarian health and outcomes in the world. This proprietary resource will drive the next ten years of discovery in its field, and is already powering Celmatix’s retained and partnered drug programs.

Celmatix’s lead program, in ovarian senescence (OS), has the potential to revolutionize women’s health, starting with chemotherapy-induced ovarian failure. It could also provide new options for women with Mosaic Turner syndrome, FMR-1 related primary ovarian insufficiency (POI), endometriosis, and PCOS.

Industry-leading multi-omics platform includes

• Proprietary cohorts including treatment and medical history, genomic data, and/or biological samples from over half a million individuals.
• Proprietary annotations including structured reproductive data from published studies, human and mouse, which are used to build clinical validity scores and reproductive phenotype classification data.
• Proprietary research tools including an annotation platform covering all published research in the field, kept current with NLP neural network models that automatically predict the type and relevance of new studies.
• Licensed cohorts including genotyping/whole exome sequencing paired with diagnoses, medical history, and health and lifestyle information.

Key partnerships

Through the Personalized Reproductive Medicine initiative, Celmatix has partnered with fifteen of the leading reproductive health centers of excellence in the United States to collect thousands of biological samples, all paired with full medical and clinical history, including reproductive partner data. Through a long-term research collaboration, including an investment fueling growth, Evotec is partnering with Celmatix to identify and validate targets for conditions with high unmet need such as endometriosis, PCOS, and ovarian senescence.

As part of its partnership with Evotec, Celmatix is providing novel PCOS targets to Bayer to support their mission to bring new treatments to women facing this debilitating disease. This five-year collaboration will yield multiple clinical candidates, with Bayer contributing to discovery efforts as well as taking the lead on clinical development and commercialization. Over 225 million women in low and middle-income countries need access to better contraception. With funding support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Celmatix is laying the groundwork to identify novel targets for next-generation female contraceptive drug discovery.

Key contributor for Celmatix

Stephen Palmer, PhD, CSO is a biopharmaceutical veteran with over 30 years of experience in drug discovery and development. This includes a rare combination of R&D expertise as a pharmaceutical executive at top global biopharmaceutical companies, scientific founder of a biotech that was acquired by a public pharmaceutical company, and as a thought leader at an academic institution pioneering new uses of DNA-encoded libraries in drug discovery. During Dr. Palmer’s tenure at Merck Group, he served as Global Head of Reproductive Health Research, overseeing research, development, regulatory, and post-approval research and marketing activities of key women’s health drug programs. Dr. Palmer then led the spinout of the first orally-available FSH programs from Merck, becoming scientific founder and CSO of TocopheRx, where he led a team to successfully develop two small molecule FSH receptor (FSHR) allosteric agonists. The foundation was laid for Dr. Palmer’s success at Merck and TocopheRx during his early research in endometrial and cervical biology at J&J. His work in contraceptive research at the J&J Pharmaceutical Research & Development Institute (J&JPRI) led to the discovery of non-steroidal progestins and progesterone receptor modulators with high selectivity against androgen, corticosteroid, and estrogen receptors. Most recently, Dr. Palmer served as Associate Professor and Director of Lead Discovery and Development at the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor, where he led a team in applying DNA-encoded chemical library (DEC-Tec) technologies toward the discovery of novel regulators of reproductive, inflammatory, and oncology targets.

Meet the leader behind the success of Celmatix

Piraye Yurttas Beim, PhD, Founder & CEO of Celmatix has been innovating in women's health for over 20 years. During her PhD work at Cornell (Weill, NYC) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the early 2000s, she was on the front lines of precision medicine in oncology and saw the transformational impact of genomics on drug target selection and biomarker-based patient stratification on the emergence of targeted therapies and the corresponding improvement in the standard of care. After completing her post-doc focused on mammalian reproduction at the University of Cambridge (UK), she was inspired to found Celmatix. The vision of the company since its founding has been to accelerate precision medicine innovations in women’s health. Under Dr. Beim's leadership, Celmatix pioneered breakthroughs in decoding the genomic drivers of ovarian function and health, and led the development of Celmatix’s ovarian health platform, an ambitious, decade-long, multi-omics initiative that has yielded unprecedented insight into the key molecular drivers of ovarian function and reproductive health conditions. Dr. Beim has also been a primary inventor of most of Celmatix’s innovations, including the lead AMHR2 agonist and follow-on AMHR2 antagonist programs, each a first-in-class approach to the modulation of ovarian folliculogenesis. In addition to leading the development of novel therapeutics, she has also developed diagnostics and digital health products in the women’s health field. Dr. Beim has also been widely recognized as a business leader. She is a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, was named to Crain’s 40 Under 40 as well as its Notable Women in Tech, Goldman Sachs's Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs, Top 15 founders disrupting their industries by Fortune, and Rock Health's Disruptive Founder of the Year.

“We have decoded ovarian function, which lies at the center of a complex endocrine signaling network.”