In this interview, Dr. Jennifer Garrison of the Buck Institute explains the purpose and structure of the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality (GCRLE). The consortium aims to uncover the causal mechanisms of ovarian aging, with the long‑term goal of developing interventions that could delay or eliminate menopause. To accelerate translation of basic discoveries into therapies, GCRLE funds scientists worldwide through grants supported by the Bia Echo Foundation and co‑founder Nicole Shanahan. The initiative has established research centers at the Buck Institute and the National University of Singapore, and it is building a global network that links basic researchers, clinicians, biotech founders, and ambassadors. Garrison emphasizes the equality dimension: menopause affects half the population, carries significant health risks (cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, cognitive decline) and economic costs, especially as women live longer post‑menopause. She outlines two major opportunities—raising public and cross‑gender awareness of ovarian aging, and the potential to impact half the world’s population—and two primary challenges: chronic under‑funding and the need for sustainable, long‑term grant structures, as well as societal taboos and historic sex bias in biomedical research. The conversation calls for a cultural shift to make reproductive longevity a mainstream health priority.
Chapters
The Global Consortium— so it is meant to be global— for Reproductive Longevity and Equality. It's a mouthful, right? It doesn't really roll off the tongue. Powerful words. But every piece of it is important. So for us, reproductive longevity is really just about understanding what causes ovarian aging. What is the causal thing that sets a woman's ovaries to start aging in her late 20s and early 30s? We don't know what that causal thing is. And it's something where if we could understand the underlying causes, we could potentially develop interventions to slow it down or get rid of it altogether. And people like latch onto that last thing I just said and say, oh, she wants to get rid of menopause. And that's true. Like in a moonshot way, if I could have anything I wanted in the world, I would definitely get rid of menopause. But there's a lot of nuance to thinking about this. And really, ideally, our goal at the consortium is just to accelerate and facilitate taking those really fundamental discoveries that happen and translating them into products and therapies for women, full stop. That's it. We want to make things go faster. And the way that we do that right now is we fund grants to scientists all over the world. And the reason that we're doing that is because there has been just horrible underfunding of women's health in general, but especially women's reproductive aging. There just hasn't been a lot of money in the space. And as a scientist, as someone who runs a research lab, I can't work on a problem. It can be the most exciting and interesting scientific question in the universe, and I can't work on it unless I have grants to fund it. And so we saw this as a real, as a, as an urgent need. And with the very generous donation from seek funding from the Bia Echo Foundation and Nicole Shanahan, who's been an incredible partner in this, and she's co-founded the consortium with me. We are funding scientists all over the world. Part of what we're trying to do with our funding is to stimulate research in the area, but we're also working on providing a lot of resources to our grantees and also to our center members. So this all started because Nicole came to the Buck Institute. She was really prescient in understanding that this was an urgent issue for women, and she asked us at the Buck Institute if we would be willing to start a center, like physically at the Buck, to study female reproductive aging. And I became part of that center. And then as soon as we started it, we realized that if we were going to have a true impact, we really needed to do something bigger. And that's where the consortium came in. There's a second center that we started in Singapore. So at the National University of Singapore, the Asia Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality. And so for the center members and the grantees, they spend a lot of time thinking about what can we do as a, as a partner to help these scientists do things faster? So part of that is building a network. And I think about this as if I want— essentially, we need an army of creative scientists, but then we also need to pair them with clinicians, right? And this is a conversation that historically doesn't happen very often in science, right? Scientists tend to like to talk to each other and to be a little bit standoffish with other people, including clinicians and biotech and pharma. And so I spend a lot of time actually building out the network of people who are interested in this space. So that includes literally anyone with an interest. You, Claudia, are an ambassador. We need ambassadors, but also people like Louise Newsom, clinicians who actually have the patients, the scientists, obviously, but also fund early-stage biotech like Nina and potential founders. And we're trying to build this ecosystem in a in a way that, that is different from the way that things have been done before. We have a website, you're welcome to go there. You can read about the things that we're doing, you can join our network. Can you share the website with my audience so they know? Yeah, it's just gcrl.org, g-c-r-l-e dot org. And that last part, I will just say the last part, the equality part, I personally really see this as an issue of equality. We're talking about half the population here, right? If a woman is lucky enough to live to midlife, and she will undergo menopause. It's unavoidable. It's like death. There's no escaping it. And as we start to extend healthy longevity, which is what the Buck Institute is trying to do and what aging researchers all over the world are trying to do, as we make progress in extending healthy longevity, if we don't address reproductive longevity, then suddenly women are going to be living more of their lives after menopause than before. And menopause does have a detrimental effect on even healthy women's risk for all sorts of things like cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, stroke, cognitive decline. There's just a lot of things that happen that don't need to happen. So we think the things, the advances that are going to most rapidly lead to, to progress in this space are going to be through collaborations between academia and industry. So for me, the equality piece is really about the fact that Every aspect of an adult woman's life is influenced by the fact that she's going to go through this reproductive decline in the middle of her life. And this typically happens right at the moment when most women are reaching the pinnacle of their careers, if they have careers outside the home. And it just, it impacts every aspect of their lives, whether they want to have biological children or not. For me, from the moment I went through puberty, the ticking biological clock in the back of my mind influenced my career decisions, my education decisions. Everything. And men don't have that. They just don't. And this is something where I think if we could extend, if we could extend the number of healthy eggs that a woman has at age 40 by 1% or 2%, if we could change those numbers and push out the age of menopause by a few years, that would be a game changer for women. It would be profound. And that's just, that's like the lowest That's the lowest thing that I hope to achieve. What do you see as the biggest opportunity and what are the biggest challenges in achieving that? Jennifer? Yeah, the biggest opportunity, I think there's two opportunities that I think are really achievable right now. One is to make this something, to make this a topic of discussion that is on everyone's mind and not just women. This is an important thing for men to understand as well, and not simply because they have females in their lives that they care about. This is important for men because there's a genetic component here that's important for longevity for both men and women. And there's an economic component here, which we haven't discussed at all, but cost of menopause is profound and it's growing, right? The number of women in menopause by 2025 globally will be more than a billion, which means that's over 10% of the world's population. That's going to be women actively in past menopause, and there are healthcare costs associated with that. And finally, as I mentioned before, understanding why ovaries age prematurely is going to tell us something about aging in the rest of the body in both men and women. And so this is something— the opportunity here, we are at a historic moment. There is a groundswell of interest in the space, and we're at a historic moment where we can actually change something for real in women's lives. And so I want this to be— I want this to be conversation that is had around every dinner table. I want everyone to understand what ovaries are and how they work and what happens with age. That's opportunity number one. Opportunity number two is to really change the world. Like, we have the opportunity to discover something that will make a difference in the lives directly of half the world's population. That's profound. The challenges are what I already mentioned. Funding is a huge challenge, and particularly for basic research. I think one of the things we're trying to do with our grants, like I mentioned before, is to really think about them differently. I'm measuring progress not in papers published and talks given at meetings. I am measuring progress in how quickly we can move something into the clinic, whether that's a product or a therapy and, or many products and many therapies. And I think one of the big challenges in funding scientific research is that me as a scientist, I have to get many different grants to fund my lab. There's none that are long enough. There's none that are large enough to actually fund all the science in my lab. And I'm basically like a, a lot of people don't understand how science funding works. I'm basically like a small business. I have to bring in the money to fund all all of my people's salaries, all of the equipment, all of the supplies, everything, my salary. I bring that money. The institute where I'm housed kindly gives me space and support for grants and HR and facilities, and I fund my research. And so what we need really is sustainable funding, because what happens right now is that I have this patchwork of grants that are partially overlapping and different lengths of time and different amounts of money. So many different patchwork grants, and I'm constantly having to apply for new funding to fill the gaps. And what that leads to is really incremental progress, right? Because every few years I have to slightly pivot my research program to fit a call for funding, right? Because I need to be able to get that money. And you know, what we need is sustainable funding. We need to fund scientists, we need to fund the lab and the scientists themselves, not specific projects, right? Because what happens with grant funding is I'll apply for a grant that is for this little tiny thing that, that some foundation or the NIH thinks is important, when really, like, I know what's important and I need to be able to follow where the research takes me, right? When I get an experimental result that disproves my hypothesis, I need to be able to pivot to do something else. And beyond that, I need to be able to, to think creatively, and I can only think creatively if I have a runway that is that's like in sync with how science works, and it takes more than a few years usually to get really important results. So we're trying to think about how to structure our grants, and for the next few rounds, what we're going to do is we're going to have a pot of money that's for new grants because we want to keep bringing people into the space, but we also want to have a pathway for existing grantees to get sustainable funding. So yeah, funding. And the other challenge really is that there has been a systemic bias both in society with taboos around talking about women's health, talking about Talking about menopause. That's been, that's been forever really something, a conversation that's been hard to have. We're trying to remove those taboos, but there's also been a systematic bias towards males in biomedical research, a sex bias. And that's also changing. But again, these things have really held up progress.
