Future of Fertility_Somer Baburek: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Future of Fertility_Somer Baburek: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Abby Mercado:
Hi, I'm Abby Mercado, an IVF mom, former VC investor, and CEO of Rescripted. Welcome to The Future of Fertility, a podcast dedicated to shining a light on the entrepreneurs and innovators who are changing the face of family building. With billions in funding over the past few years, we'll introduce you to the people, the ideas, and the businesses that are changing the fertility industry and in turn, millions of people's lives. The future of fertility is bright. Now let's get into it!

Abby Mercado:
Somer Baburek is the co-founder, CEO, and president of Hera Biotech. Terra Biotech is developing and commercializing the world's first non-surgical test for definitive diagnosis and staging of endometriosis. Hera's mission is profound, to relentlessly seek to understand the root cause of diseases and women's health, thereby uncovering new ways of diagnosing and treating them. One in ten women have endometriosis, and up to 30% of the Rescripted community have this excruciatingly painful disease. We can't develop treatments for Endo without a better way to diagnose it, which is why Somer is doing something really special. I'm thrilled Somer is in our collective camp. Welcome to the podcast, Somer!

Somer Baburek:
Thank you! I'm so excited to be here. I'm so excited that you invited me!

Abby Mercado:
Of course. I mean, I wouldn't have had it any other way. I think you're amazing. So to start us out, we're super excited to hear about you and about what you're doing with Hera. So just start us out, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? And I would love to, especially like, let's make this fun with one fun fact about you that few people know. So who is Somer?

Somer Baburek:
Sure. Oh, my gosh. I don't even know if I know who she is yet.

Abby Mercado:
... that's my friend. ...

Somer Baburek:
I'm still growing up. No, so well, background. So I have an undergrad from the University of Texas in entrepreneurship. My master's is in data analytics from LSU, Louisiana State University for people who don't know, and then I spent ten years working for a life science venture capital fund, and two of their fund companies that were in drug development, got quite a bit of experience there. The two companies that I was working for were acquired and then really decided that I wanted to get back into women's health, which is my area of passion. I fell in love with it in my undergrad and I invented a medical device there that was based on my experience with my labor and delivery with my first daughter. And so a fun fact about me that very few people know well, at least few people in this community is I used to rodeo professionally. I was a barrel racer and I was also a rodeo queen, so weird, but yeah!

Abby Mercado:
That's like the funnest fact I have heard in a very long time. Okay, I have so many questions, well, I have a lot of questions, but I specifically want to dig into the barrel racing. So are you, you said you're originally from San Antonio?

Somer Baburek:
I'm originally from a small part of Texas called the Rio Grande Valley, small but mighty.

Abby Mercado:
Yes.

Somer Baburek:
But my family moved north, believe it or not, to San Antonio, summer before my freshman year of high school.

Abby Mercado:
Okay. So of the, like, how would you describe barrel racing? Like, why did you pick, why would you, why? I mean, I'm from Texas and I love this stuff, right? So like, I know, but for the benefit of the listeners, why like, how does barrel racing stack up against other things you can do from a rodeo perspective?

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. So for Women's Professional Rodeo Association, so there's like a long history about women in rodeo, just like there is about women and anything else that we all deal with. But originally, barrel racing was the only event that a woman could compete in, in professional rodeo, and we didn't get equal pay. And so a group of barrel racers got together and formed a competing organization called the Women's Professional Rodeo Association, offered all the events to women, which drew quite a bit of interest, you can imagine, with female bull riders and bronc riders and whatever else. And so the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association basically gave women equal pay, but maintained that at PRCA rodeos, barrel racing is still the only event that women compete in. But I picked it because it's fast. It's a timed event. Yeah, it's a timed event. It's beautiful, fast horses. My dad used to describe it as round circles and straight lines, and that's the fastest way to get through the pattern. So it's a cloverleaf pattern, it's a timed event, fastest time wins. And it was just, it was a thrill. Absolute thrill.

Abby Mercado:
I love it. And so what does it mean to be a rodeo queen?

Somer Baburek:
Oh, well, so rodeo queen was a little different for me. I was a pretty big tomboy growing up. I didn't really even brush my hair very often, and I.

Abby Mercado:
You should meet my daughter. You guys might have a lot in common.

Somer Baburek:
Pretty sure my ten-year-old's headed right down the same track. But anyways, so I actually had a buddy who bet me that I wouldn't compete for Rodeo queen in my region in high school rodeo, and, but I did. And then I went to State and then I won State and then I went to Nationals and I won the national title as well. And I was the first queen from Texas to win in 27 years. It was super fun.

Abby Mercado:
.... Come on. When did you step it up?

Somer Baburek:
Yeah, actually, I think it's because the Texas team won the team trophy every single year, because as far as Rodeo goes, we're pretty awesome. And so I think that was like the one place where you could subjectively be like, no, Texas can't have this one.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. Do you watch Yellowstone?

Somer Baburek:
No. Everybody asks me that! I don't, it's funny. I'm like an extremist, right? So I was all in, I did it professionally, that was my job, my life came off the road, I sold my horses. And I don't, like I don't even go to the rodeo. Like, I don't want to go because I'm like, well, if I'm not going to do it, why be there?

Abby Mercado:
Well, we should go together and you can teach me all the things. And you should also definitely watch Yellowstone. Like the barrel racers have kind of a funny presence.

Somer Baburek:
I've heard about that. I'm like, I don't know if I would appreciate that or if I would not, I don't know.

Abby Mercado:
It's funny, it's funny. You'd probably want to debunk some myths if I know you so.

Somer Baburek:
Probably.

Abby Mercado:
So, lots to dig in, in your interest. So you got a master's in data science and you went to work in pharma. Would you say that's like a common path that people who have advanced degrees in data science choose?

Somer Baburek:
Probably not. Probably not. And I, to be transparent, did not have my masters until I was already working in venture capital. So I think that the reason that the venture capital fund, I could probably find this out if I wanted to but I just haven't asked, picked me up was because of my invention. And then I think that I was able to show them that I could add a lot of value to the team by digging really, really deep, really quickly on different types of technologies in life science, just because it was an area of passion for me. And so that was really my job. I helped with the diligence, I would help put together the memos, make recommendations, and then if we chose to invest in a company, we were an early-stage VC. So oftentimes our companies didn't even have in-patient data yet, and so I would then help the management team of the company orient themselves as to what it was to have formal institutional VC money and what was required of you when you had that kind of money, which didn't always make me the favorite, but that's okay.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I bet you were not the favorite, but I'm sure we'll get more into that. Okay, so this medical device. So tell us about that. Like, how do you invent a medical device based on your own experience?

Somer Baburek:
You know, it sounds more complex than it was or I think it was. I think when you say things like I invented a medical device, people like see you as Doc Brown. And I'm like, I don't even really like that word. Like, I don't want to have crazy hair in your mind and be like, I'm an inventor. .... Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
She made, for the listener, she made the doctor evil expression. That's fun, yeah.

Somer Baburek:
I forget you can't see me, that's amazing. Perfect. So, yeah, I, so I had a long labor and delivery with my first daughter and they had induced me, I had done the pitocin, I had done the .... I went in at one centimeter and after 26 hours I was at a half. So I'd gone the wrong way. And the doctor came in and she was like, she's known me since I was like 16. And she said, well, Gold Star, Sis, however, we probably need to get this baby out because we can't keep her on the monitor, which that's exactly, if you don't understand what that means, that's exactly the level of understanding that I had of what she was talking about. And I just thought, okay, well, you're the doctor. I guess you know what's best. Which was really upsetting to me because I had done all of that with no epidural, I had wanted a natural labor and delivery. I wanted to get up and move around and try to help stimulate labor naturally. But I wasn't allowed to because they couldn't keep the baby on the monitor, whatever that meant. And so after the C-section, which was just insane, my anesthesiologist was horrible. He was on the phone while the surgery was happening. My blood pressure dropped. I had severe nausea, the spinal road high, I didn't have good control over my arms, I was bleeding excessively because I'd been in labor for so long. I mean, it was just like, if it could go wrong, it did go wrong. And so after that. I remember sitting in the room and I was like, what the hell are they talking about with keeping this baby on the monitor? Like, surely that, everything we just did could not have been better than letting me just get up and walk around like I don't understand. And so I just started doing research because I thought, I don't know what they were looking for, but there's got to be a better way to get it. And so essentially I figured out that they use a pressure sensor on your stomach to monitor contractions and then a Doppler to measure the baby's heart rate. And basically what they're looking for are spikes or drops in the baby's heart rate that do not correspond to a uterine contraction. The problem is that pressure sensor on the top of the abdomen, like if I sit up, it registers a contraction. If I move, it could register a contraction. If I don't know, I have excess gas, it could register a contraction. So it's not a very reliable way to get the information that they were looking for. And so essentially what I did is, in our practicum class for our last semester, we had to be paired with a team of engineers who had started a product, and then they got paired with a team of business students who wrote a business plan around that product. I didn't want to work on any of the projects that I saw, so I petitioned the dean to let me do it without an engineering team, which they allowed me to do, the only caveat was I had to have a prototype at the, at the finals, and so, which was the competition. And so I literally was like hanging out in the engineering building, just stalking engineers, like, hey, what kind of engineer are, you hey, what kind of engineer are you? I don't know if you know much about engineers.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, I do. I'm married to one. I'm actually I'm married to a biomedical engineer. So, yeah, it's like.

Somer Baburek:
They scare easy, in college. Like random women, like saying, hey, what kind of a freaking engineer are you? They're like, oh, my gosh.

Abby Mercado:
You know what? None of you have ever spoken to me. It's, yeah, yeah.

Somer Baburek:
It was weird, but I found a PhD biomedical engineer and an undergrad electrical engineer who were crazy enough to say, yeah, we'll help you, like, for no benefit. I mean, they, they weren't getting a grade on this, so they just literally, out of the kindness of their heart, helped me. And what we came up with was a device that had five patches that sat on the maternal abdomen. It used electrical signals generated by, that were specific to the uterine muscle and captured that and then measured the fetal and did the same thing with the fetal heart rate and used an algorithm to separate out mom's fetal heartbeat. And so that was our, we had a very rough prototype that, thank goodness my cousin was pregnant at the time, so I was able to put it on her and record it, getting the baby's heartbeat. And we had her sit up and it did not register a contraction. So we kind of showed that we, in theory could work.

Abby Mercado:
Okay, ... Commercial? It's like where?

Somer Baburek:
It did not, it did not. So that was my first venture and I found what I thought was a blocking patent. Hindsights 2020, it was not a blocking patent and I probably could have done really well with it. But there's an incredible company out there right now called Bloom Life that's doing something very, very similar. Their CEO is lovely and I think that they're going gangbusters right now.

Abby Mercado:
That's awesome. Did you, did you specifically find what you thought was the blocking patent yourself?

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. So I had a patent.

Abby Mercado:
Because patent attorneys can be really expensive.

Somer Baburek:
Right, yeah. I did not have a patent attorney. I could not afford one. And so what happened was I was talking to a contract engineering firm or contract manufacturing firm for prototypes, and they were like, this kind of sounds like X, Y, Z. And I was like, no, it doesn't, who's X, Y, Z? And so I went searching because you can do that, and I found it, and as I read it, I was like, man, this is a lot of what I want to do. There's some differences, but I bet they would fall under this and just didn't have the experience at that point, didn't have the wherewithal or really the grit to just be like, screw it, I'll do it anyways.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. But now you're on to something. So let's, let's, let's fast forward. So tell us about, tell us the Hera founding story.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. So I, after working for the fund and the two companies got acquired, it just felt like a really natural time to depart. The fund was fully invested and those companies were closing down US operations. And so I originally started just kind of looking for a job in San Antonio next thing. And I know this will come as a shock to a lot of people, but San Antonio is not a mecca for life sciences. Shock.

Abby Mercado:
Shocker. ... How about that? Okay.

Somer Baburek:
... That's going to be a pass for me today. But yeah, so I decided it was funny because I was actually kind of beating my head up against the wall over it. And I am lucky enough to be married to an amazing person. And he said, gosh, it's weird. Like, if only you knew how to look at technologies and evaluate whether they'd be successful and like start a business and get venture funding. And I was like oh, right. I do know how to do those things. So I went about looking for technology, all the big Ivy League places where most people find really amazing technology, and there was a lot of things happening in the world of therapeutics. But when you dig in to the science behind it, what you see is that these are not disease-modifying therapeutics. These are therapeutics that are meant to help control your symptoms, which was just a flare in my mind of, oh, we don't understand these diseases very well. We can't diagnose them very well, therefore we can't meaningfully treat them. We obviously have to do something. So we're trying to control symptoms that are disruptive, but let's go find something that can meaningfully put the cart behind the horse so that we can diagnose it, track the progress, understand the disease, and then meaningfully treat it. So I started looking for a diagnostic and I had a colleague. Go ahead.

Abby Mercado:
I want to talk to you for a second because maybe I'm just being a big dummy. But so you said like you're going to go, like you went to these Ivy League institutions essentially to find these ideas that were in the works, like, can anyone do that?

Somer Baburek:
Yeah, anybody can do it.

Abby Mercado:
How would anybody do that?

Somer Baburek:
Yeah, all of these universities have well, most of these universities have what's called a technology transfer office, and they're pretty easy to find. You can find like, go to UniversityOfTexas.edu and then search the site for technology transfer. And most of the universities will have some version of an online, let's call it a catalog that shows you these are all the, this is all the research that's being done at our institutions and this is what intellectual property has come out of it. And they're all in different stages. Some of them have issued patents, some of them have filed patents, some of them have provisional patents. And so you can really drill down by specialty or area of interest and say, okay, this is all the oncology work that's being done at wherever university. Oh, this this molecule looks promising as a treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma or whatever your expertise is. And then you can call them and say, hey, I'd really like to talk more about this. And sometimes you have to sign an NDA, but usually for the first conversation you can keep it pretty superficial just to get a better understanding of what's been done. And if the patents are already issued, they should have a lot of latitude as to what they can talk to you about just because, what, you can't steal the patent, so what are you going to do? And so that's, that's how you find available technology.

Abby Mercado:
Thank you for the 101. Okay.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. Sorry. No, no problem. I should have said that. I'm sorry. So, yeah, I found this technology at the University of Texas. I had a colleague that worked in the tech transfer office that called me and said, hey, I heard you're looking for women's health, you know, And I said, yeah, but it's got to be a diagnostic. And he's like, I got it. And so I went down and met with him, looked at the technology, kind of, they had like a brief slide deck that I looked at, and to be frank, I was like, I've heard this word before, endometriosis. So I'm going to go start looking at the problem because from, from my perspective, being a non-scientist, non-PhD, I don't find interest in cool stuff that I researched. Like that's not helpful in the marketplace, so it has to solve a problem and it has to solve a problem that people care about. So I started looking at endometriosis as a problem and where it was and how many people have this issue, and even just the lack of data that we have on how many people have endo, what is the incidence, what is the prevalence, how does the disease ...? I mean, we can't even today agree on how the disease starts, like how does that even, and so I was like, okay.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. That was going to be one of my questions for you. Like, how little do we know about endometriosis, like, really, just a frighteningly little amount, yeah, okay.

Somer Baburek:
It's, it's absolutely frightening. I mean, if you think about it in terms of, like when you know about a disease, usually you start changing the way that you diagnose and treat it because you learn about the disease. We haven't changed the way we diagnose endometriosis since 1927, and that's pretty much when we started doing laparoscopy. So.

Abby Mercado:
I mean, 1927 actually.

Somer Baburek:
Not really, not really. But yes, surgical diagnosis.

Abby Mercado:
Two years before the Great Depression, you know.

Somer Baburek:
I mean, literally. So we started diagnosing endometriosis by surgery in 1927. We still diagnose it by surgery in 2022. The surgery is different, but the means of diagnosis is the same. And so it's just.

Abby Mercado:
Can I get like a quick stat, just a quick fact, how much does the surgery for endometriosis cost the system?

Somer Baburek:
The average cost in the US is 17,656 dollars.

Abby Mercado:
Okay. Good. Just wanted to know that fact. Thank you.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. I mean, the crazy thing is, right? Like I, that's a fact. You can find other stats too. So it really depends on the health system. That's the stat that we found that we thought, okay, this is a reasonable sample size, this is a good indicator of what we're talking about, it's going to be more in some places, it's going to be less in some places, but that's a good general average.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Somer Baburek:
So and the thing about it is, is it's funny, like when you listen to people talk about it because, you know, they're like, oh, but laparoscopic surgery, that's like minimally invasive. And you go home the same day and I've had a minimally invasive procedure, it was not for endo, it was for something else, I was out for a week. Like, I don't know what anybody is talking about, like, you can go just have swaths of tissue excised out of your abdomen and go back to work in a couple of days. Like, let's see you try like talk about man cold. Like, let's see. These are like men being like, oh, it's minimally invasive, and most of my patients go right back to work. It's like I had a male OB-GYN for about 5 seconds and he did a biopsy.

Abby Mercado:
No, no, we think you're awesome, male OB-GYNs.

Somer Baburek:
I do, this one was this one was not. This one was not. And he took the biopsy and I was like, oh my gosh. And he goes, oh, most women don't even feel that. And I was like, I think most women just don't tell you. Like, I don't know that anybody clips tissue off of anyone else. And they're kind of like, yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Just the clip. Clip.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Like it's going to hurt probs.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah, it was, we had some colorful exchange after that and he was no longer my OB-GYN but that's okay. Yeah, I don't mean to bash male OB-GYNs, that was just my experience with the one that I had. I have lots of friends who love their OB-GYNs who are men. But yeah, I think one of the things that, and maybe this is why I reacted that way is one of the things that gets me over and over. And we hear this in our presentations and it comes from physicians, it comes from researchers, it's like, oh, well, most women tolerate X, Y, Z, whatever that procedure is, very well. I think we need to reframe that. Like, can we stop having women tolerate their healthcare? Can we just, can we just start the conversation there, like, how do we change this from I'm tolerating my care to I am managing my care, I am enjoying the fact that I am being treated or cared for by the health care system.

Abby Mercado:
I feel empowered by my care, like I feel like I have been able to effectively advocate for myself because I have been educated and now I feel empowered, and now I actually enjoy this.

Somer Baburek:
Right, because I can engage. I can engage in my own care. Like it's no different than me sitting there with someone going, well, we can't keep the baby on the monitor and basically shrugging and being like, I don't know that, okay.

Abby Mercado:
I should go invent something, actually.

Somer Baburek:
But yeah, I mean, I think but, I think that that's why we're seeing all of these shifts in women's health is because women are engaging not only from a patient provider relationship standpoint, but also from an industry standpoint, from a design standpoint, from a process standpoint. You see so many amazing women completely changing how women experience healthcare because they recognize it's lacking.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. That's that's why you're here on this podcast.

Somer Baburek:
That is. That's why I'm here! That's why I'm everywhere.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, Yeah.

Somer Baburek:
Can we please change this? Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
So you, so you found this? So what happened next? Like, buy it? Like, how did it work?

Somer Baburek:
So oddly enough, universities do not relinquish their ownership of patents ever. So they do what's called licensing. So you get an exclusive license for the technology. And it is a long and tedious process. And every university is different in how they handle this. And so essentially what happened was I met with the inventors, understood the problem, talked to some colleagues who were providers, and then decided, okay, I'm going to take this forward. So I founded Hera in February of 2020 when I knew that I wanted to take the technology forward, so hold your applause for perfect timing on that. And then, because the world fell apart.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, that was fun.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. And we spent pretty much the next nine months wondering if anybody was going to care about women's health again, because everything was COVID and everything was shut down. And believe it or not, endometriosis surgeries are often considered elective. So because we all want that, it's like going in to get a little nip tuck like, oh, Bunzzy's going in to have my endo lesions excise, I was like, nope!

Abby Mercado:
Not, not so fun.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. So anyways, we spent that time really with our heads down getting the business plan put together, talking to as many providers and patients and nurse practitioners and investors as we could, early investors, and refining where we were, where we wanted to be, how we were going to approach this. And then we finally got the license executed in October of 2020 and it was like, okay, so January of 2021 we kicked off our seed funding round and it was a lot of learning, it was a lot of learning really fast because I immediately went to venture capital because we were an early stage venture capital fund. And I think I mentioned earlier in let's just call it traditional life science venture capital world. Most of the time, if you consider yourself an early-stage investor, the deals that you are looking at typically don't have data in humans because it takes live science, medical devices, all of these things so long to prove safety and all non-toxicity and all of these things. And so we're usually looking at rat data, maybe if it's crazy, we've got some pig data, which that's a whole nother conversation. And why I don't agree with any of that crap but can't even get into that right now, I have to fix women, I wouldn't even.

Abby Mercado:
I wouldn't even know where to start. Yeah, next podcast.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah!

Abby Mercado:
We'll talk about it in.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. Animal health is the next thing we're going to fix. But anyways, yeah. So when I had in-human data because we did a pilot study, I thought, oh my gosh, we are the golden ticket. We're an early-stage company that has in-human data. What I failed to realize is that traditional life science VC doesn't really invest in women's health that much, and the five or six women's health funds that are out there that specifically invest in female founders or women's health, when they say they're an early-stage investor, they expect you to have things like traction in the market or be super close to FDA or super close to commercialization, which as a traditional life science VC, I was like, oh, there's a huge disconnect here between what's considered early stage.

Abby Mercado:
And also, and also of those. I think like, like I want, we should be authentic on this podcast, why wouldn't we be? But like a lot of those firms do not lead round.

Somer Baburek:
No, they don't lead.

Abby Mercado:
And that is really frustrating.

Somer Baburek:
It's absolutely frustrating because you're left with, okay, where do I go? Traditional life science VCs don't invest in women's health and women's health VCs don't invest as a lead or prior to getting super close to FDA or, and I think part of that is a lot of these female-led funds, which I love and am hugely supportive, but if I am looking at this objectively, they rose with the rise of Femtech, this cool word that we all like to use, right? Femtech, traditionally I don't want to like get shot or like have women here.

Abby Mercado:
Not going.

Somer Baburek:
Everywhere.

Abby Mercado:
This is a safe space.

Somer Baburek:
But was like, okay, we are going to give you femtech women, we're going to let you have Mary Kay Tupperware femtech tech parties. So as long as you were an app that could track a period or your moon cycles or send you daily affirmations, and all you did was go direct to consumer with some sort of digital health product, as if that was specifically related to some aspect of female wellness, then you could get female investment from these female funds because that's a quick return. And in their defense, early funds are small funds. Small funds need quick returns so they can get to the next fund. So it is totally defensible why they're doing what they're doing or why they did what they did. It just left true scientific innovation in women's health with no home.

Abby Mercado:
It's just such an amazing conversation. Thank you for breaking that down. Like in a public setting.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
And I just, yes. All the yes, that's.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing vantage point that you have that not a lot of people have, so thank you.

Somer Baburek:
It was, yeah, it was really hard to swallow that pill, truthfully, because I was like, we're in no man's land. We don't get interest from life science VCs because we're not curing erectile dysfunction for the 58,000th time. And we don't get interest from these female-led funds because they keep saying this word traction. And what that means to them is customer acquisition in an app marketplace.

Abby Mercado:
Right.

Somer Baburek:
And I don't, I can't do that. So it was, it was a hard pill to swallow. And so after about six months of banging my head up against the wall, I finally said, okay, we got to find angel investors, and I don't know any, I don't know where to find them. And so we just started doing pitch competitions like crazy and found, home found some amazing angel groups that are very supportive of female founders and hard science-based women's health that recognize there's a gap. And we found them in the most unexpected places. Some of them were purely like so pure, like Stella Angels out on the West Coast, brilliant PhDs, physicians, veterinarians, brilliant women, all women, very supportive, industry agnostic, female-led companies. And then you have the unexpected places like the Rio Grande Valley Angel Network, which is made up hugely of agriculture money and male investors. And I thought, okay, this is going to seem weird. And I remember distinctly the way the woman introduced me, I thought, oh my gosh, they're going to think I'm like a militant feminist, which is I'm a feminist, but I don't think we should all like, run out in the back pasture and burn our bras right now. So I kind of just start and you're looking at all of these farmers and ranchers in the audience who are like, good god, what is this woman about to do? You know? And so I just was like, hey, guys, if we could just all get on the same page really quick, I'm not going to show you anything graphic, I am not going to show you genitalia in my slide deck, what we're going to be talking about is a uterus. And if we can all just agree that every one of your cows has one, we're on the same page.

Abby Mercado:
And did they all agree?

Somer Baburek:
They all immediately relaxed. They were like, oh, yeah, uteruses, our cows prolapse all the time, we're always dealing with uteruses. I was like, okay, here we go.

Abby Mercado:
Great, commonality found.

Somer Baburek:
Exactly! And you know what? Every single one of them brought their wives, their daughters, into the conversation. And we raised a significant amount of money from that group. And I love all those guys. I mean, they're just they're fantastic. And I get to deal with their wives and their daughters who are on the notes. They're like, we're I'm not doing this alone. My wife's going to be on this note, too, or it's going to be only in her name. And I'm like, that's amazing, let's do it.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. So what did you, what did you do with like, you know, I think one of my questions for you was like, as a life sciences company, what how does, how does the capital investment differ from a direct consumer period tracking app, like, you need a lot more money, right?

Somer Baburek:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
And what are you going to do with that first round?

Somer Baburek:
Yeah, so the first round is completely for clinical trial, right?

Abby Mercado:
Right.

Somer Baburek:
And early engagement with the FDA, which requires legal and FDA consultants who are typically legal and former FDA. Our first round is going solely to a second clinical trial where we want to be in a larger patient population, where we want to hopefully repeat the same results that we saw in the pilot, which was near 100% accuracy of both staging and diagnosing. So I'd love to see that in the 60-patient study. I don't as a data scientist like I don't like 100, but I would love 99, like that's ....

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Somer Baburek:
So yeah, and then we have some R&D that we're doing at the same time we have a scientific rationale to go after some other indications that are also big problems in this space. And so we're doing some of the preliminary work so that we can file IP in those areas as well.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. So tell us more about the diagnostic and the user journey associated with the diagnosis, like ...

Somer Baburek:
Yes! I am elbow-deep in this right now, so we're doing patient mapping. So we have all these crazy stakeholders in our journey, it's so much more complex than just like, oh, we just have the consumer to worry about. So we have the patient who we care immensely about and recognize that their experience with the health care system has not always been pleasant one. Then we have the physicians who are going to be the ones administering our test or collecting the sample for our test. And then we have the insurance companies who at some point should be paying for this test. And so positioning yourself to all of those stakeholders when they don't all have aligned goals can be really difficult. So, for example, we require, in our current state an endometrial biopsy, so most of your, your audience probably knows what that is because they've probably experienced an endometrial biopsy to check for things like endometrial receptivity when going through fertility intervention, we require that to conduct our test. So you have a lot of physicians who say, oh yeah, most women tolerate that really well, it's no big deal. Then you have some people who are like, oh, it's the worst thing you could possibly do to a patient. Like, you're dealing with patients who are struggling with fertility. This is not the worst thing that they're experiencing, let's just be clear. But also, we understand that that's a painful procedure and women's health has a problem with pain. So we are always exploring ways how do we reduce that pain burden? So one idea that we have right now is instead of just prescribing her an opioid so that you can do this in the office and she can't drive herself home, what about nitrous? We use it in dentistry all the time for very painful procedures, and she can get up and walk out and not have the trauma associated with any sort of pain as it relates to collecting this tissue sample. And some women, it doesn't bother them at all to have this done. I equate it to having an IUD placed, which I think is incredibly uncomfortable. But some women are like, who cares?

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I've talked about, I mean, our listeners are probably really talking about my IUD, but it was really, it was honestly, it was the most painful thing I've ever felt like.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah, it sucks. So if we can reduce that.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Somer Baburek:
And that's what we want to do. But the reason that we are sticking with that is it's the purest form of the sample that we need and the purest form of the tissue. And one thing that I think is really important distinction here, endometriosis is not in the endometrium. I don't want anybody to get confused. Endometriosis does not happen in the lining of your uterus, okay? But just like cancer, and I can't say this strongly enough, the lesions that form out in the peritoneal cavity, while they are not histologically identical to the tissue that makes up the lining of the uterus, they are similar, they have same cell types that are occurring in both or that create both, okay? So just like in cancer, the primary tumor and secondary tumors are not identical histologically. They came from the same cells and they are the same kind of cancer, so I want to make sure that we draw that distinction. So what we look for in the lining of the uterus is we're looking for the expression of a protein, so it's a gene set that we're looking at that is miss regulated. It is elevated in one cell type and it is suppressed in the neighboring cell type. That is very anomalous in nature. You don't have cell types that are sitting right next to each other behaving in complete opposite directions, that's just really rare. And the other thing is when they do that, they are almost perfectly correlated in this particular case. And so if you just took a bulk analysis of that tissue and looked at everything, it would be the equivalent of taking an average reading of all the cells. Well, they cancel each other out and it looks like nothing's happening. It isn't until you look at them individually that you see this big difference. And so this gene set that we're looking at is well known to cause invasive behavior in cells, and that's exactly what's required for the cells to then, form these lesions which are an invasive process out in the peritoneal cavity.

Abby Mercado:
Wow, this is all so amazing that you're uncovering all of this. So I legitimately could talk to you for like eight more hours about this. But because we're running short on time, I have like three or so more questions that I want to ask you. And I'm going to do like a rapid-fire round? I haven't finished yet, but okay, So first rapid-fire question. Tell me, how, how are you recruiting for these studies? Is that hard? Like as a life sciences founder like, how do you think about this?

Somer Baburek:
Sure. So we're not doing a whole lot of marketing in this trial because marketing is extremely expensive. And so we're trying to conserve resources. So we're utilizing university hospitals and private practices that have a patient population of endo patients and/or people suspected of endo or who are struggling with fertility. We have one site open right now, which is the University of Texas, University Hospital in Houston, and we're trying to use some of these university hospitals because endo has an access problem, who can afford the deductibles associated with surgery? So these university hospitals typically serve as the primary care providers for a lot of patients who struggle with access, and so we want to make sure they have access.

Abby Mercado:
Awesome. Thank you. Okay, Second, second rapid fire question. So this is actually like true or false, then can you expand? So true or false, we cannot develop drugs to cure endometriosis because we don't have an effective way to diagnose endometriosis beyond surgery?

Somer Baburek:
Mostly true.

Abby Mercado:
Okay. Can you like expand on that and why that's such a big problem?

Somer Baburek:
Yes. So when you are developing a drug, you have to take it through clinical trials and you have to have a way to prove that you are having an effect on the endometriosis disease, right? Because the only way to diagnose and track progress of endo would be to surgically track it, you can't get a drug through the clinic that makes claims on treating the disease itself because the only way to do it would be to cut the woman open multiple times while she's on this drug to see if you're having an effect. With Hera's test, because we're capable of staging, we would get a baseline reading on this patient and then you would intervene with this therapeutic, then we could take another reading. Is her reading going down? Is it going up? Is it staying the same? And that's how we would track progress, that's how we would track efficacy of a drug through the clinic.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing! So this is very, very, very, very, very important. Okay, last question, What's, what's next for Hera? Like, what's your what's your big vision for Hera?

Somer Baburek:
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So my big, big, hairy, audacious, audacious goal, or however they say it is.

Abby Mercado:
You're B-hag

Somer Baburek:
My B-hag, yes. Would be for Hera to go IPO as the first FDA-cleared diagnostic for endometriosis. We have other diagnostics in the pipeline that we have ideas about and we may or may not I cannot confirm or deny, have an idea about how to control this expression level in these cells. And so that would then lead itself to some sort of potential therapeutic, not necessarily for the lesions themselves, but for recurrence and maintenance. So those are the things that are next. I think that in and of itself is sufficient to have a publicly traded company that is female-led, that was female-funded upon going IPO, and really set the standard for a women's health company that is producing products that women want to see. And my goal is to put 100% of R&D dollars solely into women's health.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, my gosh, I have chills. You hear that VCs? She wants to IPO. She wants to take this company public, throw money at her.

Somer Baburek:
I want a stable full of unicorns.

Abby Mercado:
I love, I love a stable like that. That's amazing. Sounds pretty and sparkly and so helpful for humanity, which is the best part of it. Well, Somer, this has been absolutely amazing. I usually ask a question, what would you rescript about the fertility journey or fertility in general? But I feel like you've already answered this. It's pain. It's how women, like how women are just tolerating pain and how like, let's figure out solutions that mean that we do not have to experience the pain that we experience, so.

Somer Baburek:
Exactly.

Abby Mercado:
Thank you so much. This was absolutely amazing.

Somer Baburek:
Thank you.

Abby Mercado:
Gratitude to you and to your whole team at Hera. And I'm sure that will catch up soon.

Somer Baburek:
Yeah. And if anybody has questions, needs help, we're not offering treatments or anything like that, but I've had the pleasure of connecting with a lot of really amazing people in the space. We're happy to try to help you connect with resources so you can find us, Hera Biotech.com. I'm on LinkedIn, anywhere, we're happy to help.

Abby Mercado:
Thank you for tuning in to the Future Of Fertility. We hope you'll leave here feeling empowered about all of the exciting innovations taking place in the fertility space. If you liked today's episode and want to stay up to date on our podcast, don't forget to click Subscribe. To find this episode, show notes, resources, and more, head to Rescripted.com, and be sure to join our free Fertility Support Community while you're there.

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