Talking Biotech Podcast 427 - Addressing Disparities in Women's Healthcare - Sabrina Johnson

Everybody, and welcome to this week's Talking Biotech podcast by Collabora. Now, clearly men and women are different, and each has some significant sex-specific medical problems and needs, but there hasn't always been great parity in innovation space. So for many years, innovation for women has lagged behind, and we find ourselves just now starting to innovate new approaches to things like contraception and other specific women's issues, some of which were almost taboo to talk about in the past, but now are becoming very common in dialogue as important parts of women's health. And there's a company that's reaching out to take care of this disparity. And this is Dare Biosciences. And today we'll speak with CEO of Dare, Sabrina Johnson. So welcome to the podcast, Sabrina.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you for joining me. So tell me a little bit more about this disparity. You know, where did it start and why is there a difference between, or why is there a need What was the need for a Women's Innovation Health Initiative?

Yeah, no, I really appreciate you asking about that. And you touched on sort of the why a little bit. You know, we founded D'Arra really with the idea of putting the sole focus, right, on women's health first, both to address therapeutic gaps and also to give women novel treatment options when maybe we already have some options, but maybe they don't Work as well as they could, or they're not as convenient, right? So going to the question of why is it important, beyond the fact that women are half the population and are not just a different version of men. And so what that means is that in healthcare, as a result, there are conditions that solely affect women, right, because of her unique biology, disproportionately affect women. And we may not know why, but conditions like some of the autoimmune disorders, migraines, right, disproportionately affect women or differentially affect women. So heart disease is a great example, right? We often hear women don't manifest a heart attack.

That's right.

Right, the same way that a man does. And so without studying women and working to develop drugs specifically for women, we are, you know, not giving her the healthcare options that she deserved because either we're not treating the condition as well as it could be treated, or even worse, we're not understanding the underlying biology well enough to even attempt to treat it. And then the other piece of it is that many of these conditions in women, they're not life-threatening per se.

Hmm.

And they're not maybe even diseases the way we think about other areas. Going through menopause, right? That's just something that any woman to right to make it to that age is going to expect to occur. So it's not a disease per se, but what happens during that, if not managed, can lead to other outcomes, and not just things that we like to joke about, like hot flashes. But the reason that some of these changes are important is that they're just symptoms of underlying things that can happen. and that are happening biologically, and that can have downstream consequences. So hot flashes lead to sleep disruption, which there are data now showing that it may be also linked to Alzheimer's or higher rates of that, right, in women. So understanding all of that and treating it is important.

And you mentioned this difference between disease and just normal developmental windows that we go through in life. But there's even— let's even extend it one further. Let's talk about the issue of contraception. I mean, here's a really important part because the woman's the one who bears the— who ends up bearing the majority of the responsibility for this, it seems, even at a young age. And yet, there have been so few options. And it seems like so many options, I never really thought about this much till today, has some sort of caveat or some sort of, you know, it's either dealing with hormone— it's either using hormones to control or maybe, you know, toxic shock or other types of things that can come along with that. So, You know, what are some of the newer approaches that we may see in the areas of things like contraception?

Yeah, contraception is also a great example, as you noted, of a therapeutic category where on the one hand, we might feel like there are a lot of options because if we think back to when the pill, right, first came on the market, it's been around for, you know, since the '60s, right? So quite some time. And so on the one hand, you might feel that it's a category that's well addressed, but to your point, If one looks at just the number of unplanned pregnancies, clearly all the options that are needed are not out there, right? And to your point, it's because this isn't a one-size-fits-all, right, approach. In the end, the contraceptive product that is best for her is the one that actually is— she's going to be able to use, right?

Yeah.

And fits her lifestyle. And so some of the limitations today are in the dose form factor. Just, you know, how and when you have to use it, whether it's something you have to do every day or it's in the moment, right? So form factor can matter, whether or not it contains hormones. So hormones are a great way, right? Hormonal products are a great, highly effective way to prevent a pregnancy. But unfortunately, there are some women who can't take hormones. They're contraindicated, or maybe they're not contraindicated, but the side effect profile is not something they can imagine, you know, enduring for, if you think about it, maybe 30 years of their life, right? If you think about the time that she's got to use a contraceptive. So it could be, you know, the hormones that are in it and also just the kind of protection ultimately that she's looking for, right?

Does she—

is she in a committed relationship and they know they don't want to have children for a period of time, but then they want to reverse it? Right? They want something highly effective, and they want to reverse it. Or maybe she's not in a relationship, and so she doesn't feel she needs something that maybe is that invasive as an implant. And so, as we think about contraceptive today, some of the biggest gaps are really in the non-hormonal category, quite frankly, just because that's not where there's been as much innovation. In the hormonal category, we've solved some of the problems. We have, yes, daily Pills, but we also have patches, right, that work for weeks at a time or vaginal rings that are once a month, right? So we've taken— we even have implants, right, that release hormones over years, right, of time. And in the non-hormonal category, we definitely have implants that work over several years, like the original copper intrauterine device worked for 10 years. And then we have methods that are in the moment, condoms, spermicides, right? Things like that. But we don't have a lot sort of in between, right? A product that might be once a month where she hopefully has the effectiveness that she's looking for, but doesn't have to think about it every event, right? Or every day. But then even in the hormonal category, there are gaps. Like implants are fantastic because they work really, really, really well. But you have to have them medically inserted and removed. And some people might only want that, right, for that 2 years when they're maybe spacing, right, their family and they're planning for it and they don't want to have to get implanted every time and removed. So that ability to pause, right, to have an implant that you can kind of remotely like pause and then turn back on. So there, if you think about how people live and if you think about contraception, As this long duration, right, of time that the woman and her partner are going to have to think about it, it's pretty easy to appreciate that there's not just one product, even for a single woman. There's probably not just one product that she's going to use that whole time, right? There are different needs.

Yeah. And along this line, so especially as we see, you know, government playing more of a role in regulating women's health or stepping into women's health issues, And still mostly white guys who are making these decisions for women. How does— we need more products and more approaches and more ways to do this. And so, I didn't want to get too far into a pipeline just yet, but in looking at the pipeline for your company, you have some non-hormonal and reversible examples.

Yeah.

But, how does it work? I mean, how does a non-hormonal Reversible, are these barriers or gels, things like that?

Yeah, it's a great question. So, so one of our products, and it's in a phase 3 trial right now. So one of the product candidates is a product that is non-hormonal and it's once a month. And so the way it works is it's a vaginal ring-based technology. So as I mentioned, vaginal rings have been around for quite some time on the hormonal side where what it does is it's something the woman can insert herself. And they're designed to release drug over time. So the original manifestation of them were using hormones, right? So it was great. It was once a month, which is a time period that is very comfortable for women, right? Menstrual cycles are once a month. So it's a timeframe that women are already accustomed to thinking about. So on the hormonal contraceptive vaginal ring side, they would release hormones. But now if you want to do something non-hormonal, but have that same once a month, So what Ovaprene does is it has a ring component, but instead of hormones, it's releasing a naturally spermiostatic agent. That means something that naturally interferes with sperm moving. And then there is a physical barrier in the center, but it's, it's, it's a knitted barrier. So it's a different approach. So it has holes in it. And that's important if you're going to leave something in place for a whole month, because you have to have the normal sort of flow of fluids.

Okay.

It's that combination of the physical and the spermiostatic agent.

Oh, very good. Yeah. So your website, when you read it, speaks of accelerating innovation using a novel model. So how is Dari Bioscience challenging traditional drug development? And can you share some strategies or methodologies that have enabled you to move quickly while maintaining rigorous standards?

Yeah, and that's a great question. So, so one of, you know, the things that we decided as a company was to focus. Now, our focus is women's health, but it's a focus. So that creates a very deep sort of vertical if you think about it that way, right? We're not wandering outside of that. We don't have multiple therapeutic sort of big picture categories. We have multiple indications, but they're all within women's health. So that degree of focus already starts to create some efficiencies because now you're You're getting regulatory insights, right, around a sort of a part of the population and how the FDA might think about things when you're dealing with women. So there are efficiencies in that regard. But then we've also built our model very much in a project team model, if you think about it. So we have, we tend to have one very highly expert person in each now vertical as you think about drug development, right? Whether it's manufacturing or quality or medical or clinical, or non-clinical, right? So you have kind of that deep expertise in that area, someone who's really been there and done it. Often our team members have come from larger pharmaceutical companies where they've gotten really great sort of knowledge base in their area, but now they're coming here where we can be a little more nimble, a little more flexible in terms of how we apply it, but to your point, not really compromise on the rigor. So what happens is we structure these teams and now these teams, because our portfolio is pretty deep, are working on multiple products, but they might be working on multiple, you know, 3 different vaginal ring products and 3 different gel products and 3 different creams, right? And, and different. So now you're starting to get again efficiencies around form factors, efficiencies around who we might partner with on manufacturing, right? Efficiency around now this route of delivery, right? We know here are the complications with this route of delivery, or here are the efficiencies with this route of delivery. So all of that together, what ends up happening is you save time, you know, you save money. And because we're a highly, you know, high-level team but lean, we, if we need to bring in resources, we're tending to bring in someone who might be super, super expert in that one specific question we have or that one specific problem to solve, right? So, you're bringing in then the best and the brightest for that one thing that if we were hiring them full-time, we can't get the best and the brightest for everything, right, full-time. So, you also get that ability to bring in the talent when you need it and have the right talent in-house to identify, right, the talent that you need to bring in. So, all of that has meant, you know, for us, we've been public only for 6 years. And in that time, we've run 8 successful clinical trials, phase, you know, 1 through phase 3.

Wow.

We've gotten 1 product FDA approved. And that's across 6 different products. So, you know, it's just that team approach, that building teams with the right internal expertise so that they're almost like their own CEO of their vertical, right? To be able to make decisions and have that accountability.

I guess I really understand that model because many companies that are publicly traded are finding that lean is especially attractive and a good way to go. But what are some of the unique challenges of that? I mean, what advice would you give to other biopharma leaders on dealing with these kinds of stakeholder management challenges and effectively navigating the drug development process?

Yeah, so I think one of the keys to being successful if you are going to operate in a lean model— where I'll give a couple actually. So one is definitely picking the right people, right? You really do need to have, if you're going to be that lean, The person responsible for each of the different sort of verticals in drug development really needs to be someone who is truly knowledgeable, right, of that area, is willing to make decisions and own the decisions, right? Because that's really the only way that it's going to work well. But the other piece of it is how you build your partnerships with third parties. So, if you're going to operate that lean internally, that means that you are going to be relying on contract research organizations, contract manufacturing organizations, right? You're likely not doing it all yourself in-house. And one of the things that we've done as a company to make sure that those relationships serve us well is we've entered into almost like a strategic partnership with key vendors, right, in those areas. So, you know, we have a particular manufacturer that we work with for our gels and creams, right, based products. Right? So now they're not working with us on just one product, they're working with us on multiple products. And that creates efficiencies, both in terms of how we work together, in contracting, in scale, right? Now we're not just a super small, maybe, client of theirs, but now we're a bigger, more strategic vendor. And we've done that really across all of those kind of key functional areas in drug development where you're going to need to potentially outsource if you're small. So whether it's on the manufacturing side, Whether it's on the clinical research to run our clinical trials, whether it's on the analytical testing labs, we've picked, selected our vendors and entered into really strategic partnerships with them that are win-win, right? So, we're guaranteeing them a certain amount of business, which is good for them and the continuity, but they're guaranteeing us continuity in team, prioritization, right? The things that are going to— pricing that are going to be important for us.

Now, this is always kind of interesting because you obviously have people who are coming from big pharma who have that big pharma experience. And how does that influence operational and strategic approaches? Like, how do you take folks who have really strong big pharma experience yet still foster an innovation space that's smaller and agile?

That's a great question too. So the people that we tend to attract have the big pharma experience, but they're the people that found it very frustrating often. to be in big pharma, right? And what they found frustrating was that sometimes feeling stifled in terms of how quickly they could go or the process of making decisions, right? Just how many layers of decision-making it took. So, they tend to be people that love what they were doing, are confident, right, in their knowledge base and their ability to make decisions and to get to the right decision quickly. And they just want to be able to do it, right? And so, being in a smaller company, gives them that opportunity. We don't have as many layers, right, of bureaucracy. And it's needed in pharma. This isn't to be a dig on big pharma, but the people that we attract tend to be the people that love the work, love their job, but really want to be able to go faster. And kind of to your point of being able to go fast, but having the rigor, right, that all comes back to them having the experience. From before, to know the rigor that's required, right? To know the rules, to know the playbook, and to know it well. And where we're shaving time isn't by not following the playbook; it's by making decisions, right? There's always gray, and there's always decisions you have to make. It's being able to make those decisions a little more quickly, and that comes from also just empowering those experts to make those decisions.

Oh, very good. Well, we're speaking with Sabrina Johnson. She's the CEO of Daray. Biosciences. And this is Calabria's Talking Biotech podcast. We'll be back in just a moment. And now we're back on Calabria's Talking Biotech podcast. We're speaking with Sabrina Johnson, the CEO of Dare Biosciences, and we're speaking about innovation in women's health space and why it's needed, what some of the unmet challenges are, and then how the company is working to meet those using a novel approach. I mean, and let's go back to that idea before we dive more into clinical trials, things like that, is What are some of the major unmet areas in women's health that you're lining up to try to remedy?

Yeah. So if you think about women's health, and I'll start with just those conditions that solely affect women, there are a number of unmet needs. We've talked a little bit about unmet needs in contraception in terms of methods that are either non-hormonal or that gives the woman a little more control in terms to to when, right, her contraception is being used or the duration of that contraceptive. But as we think about women's health, there are still unmet needs even in menopause. There's been more conversation about it, but just in drugs that actually deliver the therapeutics in the way that the Menopause Society is recommending that has greater convenience. There are no products approved right now for preterm birth, which 1 in 10 babies are preterm. There's nothing approved for women for female sexual arousal disorder, which is the female Sort of manifestation of erectile dysfunction in men. So even though you know Viagra has been on the market for over 25 years, there's nothing approved for the female version of it, even though the prevalence is is similar in those two populations. But also non-hormonal therapeutics for some of the areas that can be affected in menopause, but also in women who are going through breast cancer treatment and can't take hormonal therapies, but the breast cancer treatment is going to cause. Certain changes that are that are menopause-like, even if they're not in menopause. And then there there are things like you know we have wonderful vaccines for human papillomavirus to hopefully prevent it. But we are still seeing it show up in the population, and that's what ends up causing cervical cancer. So looking at just some simple ways to clear right the virus and prevent even that risk of cervical cancer. And those are just name a few, right? There there are just so many. You know, unmet needs in women's health because there hasn't been as much innovation, right? The research dollars committed to women's health have been about 1% of the healthcare investment dollars. So, so there are a lot of, you know, unmet needs.

That's surprising, 1% when it's 50-some percent of the population.

That's a—

yeah, well, are there barriers though? Like, you have a pipeline with many different products that are at first site for stage 1, stage 2, stage 3. But in terms of clinical design and execution, especially regarding women's health and some of these very personal issues. What specific challenges do you face in attracting diverse participation? And are there any strategies or initiatives that have really proven effective in increasing women's participation?

Yeah, I love those questions and talking about it because it's something that obviously as a company focused solely on women's health, we've had to think about, right, to make sure that we can bring women into the study. So one of the big picture challenges in studying products for women. And it's one of the reasons that some of the pharmaceutical companies, frankly, over time have shied away from it a little bit. I mean, that's one of the reasons of the why that DARI exists. And we're here to accelerate, you know, interesting products that can make it to market, is that often you are studying a drug in an otherwise healthy woman, right? So think about a contraception or even something for menopause or HPV, right, treatments or, right? These are otherwise healthy people. And so you, you know, your, your, your goal of doing no harm is very important, right? You can't be treating something in someone who's otherwise healthy or, you know, and, and have a side effect profile that is not commensurate, right, with what you're doing or a risk to the purpose, to the person. So that does also make just clinical research more difficult. So it makes drug development more difficult because you have to be very mindful now. More so than if you might be working in a condition where there's a high risk of mortality, right? So you have to be very mindful of your drug, but also from the clinical trial conduct, it does make it a little trickier, right, in terms of how you motivate people to participate in the study and to your question, how you ensure you get the diversity that you're seeking, right, in the patient population that you're studying. And so what we found in terms of very practical You know, how do you make that happen? And we've been successful so far in doing that. And the key to it is quite simple. On the one hand, it's intentionality, right? We're intentional about it, which means every step of the way of writing the protocol, of picking the sites that we're going to utilize for the study, thinking about, you know, what is going to happen then when she comes in for a visit, how long is the visit, how often does she need to come in? All of that comes into play because you're motivating someone to, you know, do something and participate in a study, but they're not sick per se. Or if they are sick and you want them to come in for the study, now you got to think about, you still want to get the diversity that you want. And maybe they're in a socioeconomic group where it might be hard for them to come into a clinic visit that's 3 hours, right? Or the clinic's not at a bus stop, right, in the neighborhood. So you have to think of all those things. And the way that we've been successful to date in doing that is thinking about all of those things, right, and trying to be practical around it. So we ran one of our phase 3 trials during COVID summer of 2020, like COVID shutdown summer. And that was a great lesson learned about how intentional you have to be. And if you just think about it, right? So in that particular circumstance, we were like, okay, we got to eliminate visits, right? We got to make this super easy. And sometimes what that— in that particular study, and we got the ethnic diversity that we wanted. We wanted, you know, over 50% of the women to be women of color. And we achieved that and got, you know, the trial ended up recruiting ahead of schedule, which never happens. But But as we look back, it was really because in that case, COVID forced us to really think about the protocol and be intentional. And now we're taking those lessons learned into other studies, right, around less visits, shorter visits, maybe taking risks sometimes where you have them come in for a visit and you go ahead and let them enroll in the study while you're waiting for some of the screening results, lab tests maybe that take more time, as opposed to maybe them having them come in twice. Right. So things like that that make it easier for the patient, that's the key.

Oh, very good. And I know I'm a scientist. I'm not someone who works in pharma or really understands how it ticks. But it's intriguing that here you are, a small company with a good pipeline, but you work with external partners and develop partnerships in clinical trials and manufacturing, things like that. So how do you establish and maintain those strong relationships And what criteria do you use to decide who to partner with?

Yeah, well, partnership— partnering is key to our model. And one of the things I maybe should have mentioned upfront is even the way we pick the products in our portfolio, most of them were not invented by us, right? We started with— we had the conversation about what are some of the unmet needs in women's health. So our methodology of trying to really transform women's health, right, and bringing her disruptive products that haven't been brought to her before is we start with the concept of what is the unmet need. And then we design the target product profile, right? In a perfect world, if we were going to address that, what would that product look like? Then we literally go searching for, has someone invented something like that, right? Or close to that, or exactly that, whatever the case may be. And so, right from the beginning, when that product candidate is coming into our portfolio, that's a partnership right there, right? And then we tend to— we have so far to date entered into partner collaborations to commercialize the product on the other end, right? We now move it forward and we're going to have a commercial collaborator. And I highlight those things, and I'll talk about the service providers as well in the middle, because on both ends there's a collaboration that's involved, right? And that means we are Needing to understand what's important to that collaborator and what can we bring to the table, right? And finding that marriage, because they are like, you enter an agreement, it's like a marriage, that contract and that structure that's going to ensure that we can both bring the best to the table, right? In the case of our product candidates, they're bringing their wonderful technology to the table and we're bringing our ability to execute it against it. Well, the same goes for our collaborators, whether it's a manufacturing collaborator, a clinical trial collaborator, we're really trying to pick the companies that can bring what we need to the table. They've got the best manufacturing technology for a gel. They have a really specific expertise in a vaginal ring technology. They've run other successful clinical trials in women, in solely women, and they've demonstrated they can get the demographics as a clinical research organization that we need. So, so we pick them because they have a talent, a skill, but we also pick them for like, how much do they believe in our mission, right? How aligned are they going to be with working with us to achieve what we're trying to achieve and give us what we need, right? And, and we don't want to work with a partner that— let's use clinical research organization as example— where women's health is not a priority for them. Right. We want to work with a clinical research organization that sees the opportunity within that field of research and sees the opportunity to have Dara be a premier relationship for them, right? So that's what we're looking for. We're looking for the talent, but also, are they aligned with our mission and are they going to be an extension of our team?

Yeah. And I guess with any relationship like that, With the benefits, there's also some risks, especially around confidential data, things like that.

Yes, exactly.

And so, when you're working with an external organization, how do you deal with areas like data loss or siloed information? And how do you maybe formulate communication strategies that facilitate data sharing in a way that allows you to manage data together, keep it in the right places while maintaining confidentiality?

Well, that's really the key, right? And so, the only way that these relationships work well is if we can share a lot of confidential information both ways, right? Because that's the way we can then build a relationship, a partnership that really is going to be a win for both parties. And so, it definitely, you know, you have to start with the contracts, right? The contracts really do have to spell it out and enable, like, a joint steering committee, for instance, right? A governance structure where we're giving— so I'll use our clinical research organization as an example. The only way that relationship is really going to be that win-win is if they know what our timelines are, our needs, what's coming down the pipeline. And maybe we haven't disclosed it publicly, right? We're publicly traded. Maybe we haven't talked out loud to the public about that product, but we know that where things are going and where some of our regulatory conversations are going, that we're going to want to be in a clinical trial In year X, right? And so we are under confidentiality, right, with our service providers so that we can have those quarterly discussions around, okay, this is important to us, or hey, we're pivoting, right? COVID was a great example. We pivoted that trial that ended up being a successful phase 3. We were maybe going to run a different trial that year on a different product, but decided that for COVID summer, that wasn't the right choice. But to have those conversations early. Right, with our clinical research organization under confidentiality. So that's really the key. And so what we've tried to do in these relationships is set up those kind of governance structures at a very high level, right? So that you're sharing strategic information at a high level that that organization can use to do their own strategic planning so that we're shifting and pivoting together, right?

And has this become more common? I think that COVID maybe restructured things a little bit for us where we became more comfortable with the idea that there were, you could have very valuable publicly traded companies based with small teams that could work remotely and become increasingly more effective. And do you think that this is maybe a new model for how biopharmas will look in the future?

Because I do think that gives you so many benefits, right? You're controlling costs, like in a biotech sector where there's risk and uncertainty, right? Drug development is hard enough in terms of risks and uncertainty. You know, why add to that the burden of having a team where your team needs are going to ebb and flow? If you think about a clinical trial, my needs when we're in the midst of a phase 3 trial in terms of that clinical oversight, the staff, required for that is very different from when now we filed the new drug application with the FDA and we're going through regulatory review, right? The people I need and the staff I need for one of those things is very different from the other. And if you're not operating in a virtual model, you're bearing the cost all the time, right, for those resources. So I've definitely been a firm believer for years that, you know, a virtual model gives you efficiency, it gives you, it reduces your costs, You can move faster, and you can get better talent on an as-needed basis for specific problems than you could with running your whole organization that way. And I agree, COVID, I think, has opened us all up, right? That that's an okay way to work, that you don't have— everyone doesn't have to be in the office, right, to have your company work as well. And that has extended to, right, the ability to be a little more flexible in terms of that virtual model in terms of your vendor relationships as well.

And how much of this is a trend just basically from the basic philosophy of the company? And just to give a brief aside, my friend's wife is a deer hunter. And maybe 30 years ago, she lamented that she could never get women's fitting camouflage, women's fitting boots, that if there was something made specifically for women, it had pink on it, that they didn't have effective things that were made that she wanted for her application. And we've seen that shift. I mean, you can go to any place now and find these things. But I didn't think about this, how this worked in medical innovation space, really, until I started preparing for the interview today. It seemed like, well, everything must be fine over there. Do you think that that innovation space for women is changing? Are there more companies like yours that are sensitive to this kind of disparity? And then are there other segments of the population that really need to be studied in something like, you know, sickle cell comes to mind, where there are specific population segments that maybe are a little bit neglected in terms of new innovation.

to innovate and develop our drugs, and that has some of its own challenges. But if you think specifically in therapeutic categories, you've touched on one of the challenges, and it's the reason that actually in women's health, the White House has come out with an initiative, right, around women's health to really look at how do we spark innovation and public-private partnerships that might be needed to really get the innovation going. I wish I could tell you that there were Are there hundreds of Darehs focused on women's health, right? Hundreds of companies like us there? There aren't, right? Not focused so broadly in women's health. So we need more, right? We need more innovation. And the way that works is to bring attention to it. So to your point, like there are other therapeutic categories where to get the investment that was really needed to make a difference for those patients who are important was to sometimes put policy around it and to shed light on it. So a great example is rare diseases. Right? Without putting certain policy measures and incentives in place, it was very difficult to have industry focus on it, right? You had to fit, you had to fit the two together. You had to fit the uniqueness of that disease space with how the industry works and to create the mechanism to have it fit, right? So industry could innovate. Women's health is similar in a way because like I said, some of these conditions are not life-threatening. They're life-altering. We're not talking about hundreds of people, we're talking about tens of millions of people, right, every year. So pricing strategies are different. How you develop the drugs is different, right? All of that's different. So it's another example of just one of these therapeutic categories, like rare disease was, that's going to take some mindful thinking to ensure we put the mechanisms in place so that all the innovation can happen the way it should.

Well, very good. Sabrina Johnson, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast. If anyone wants to know more about Dare Biosciences or you, where can they look on social media or maybe on the web?

Yeah, definitely. So definitely go to our website, which is just darebioscience.com, is definitely a great place to go. And of course, we are on, you know, the different LinkedIn and You know, other social platforms as well. But our website is a great place to start for sure.

Well, wish— best wishes going forward. I think it's really exciting. My job over here as a host of a podcast, I get asked to check out a company. I get excited by the products sometimes. I get excited by the mechanisms. I get, you know, really excited about solving a problem of a disease. But this one has such a different philosophical impact that just has been overlooked. And, you know, I hate to say it, by me too. I never realized that there was such a disparity. And so I thank you for bringing this to my attention, and I thank you for bringing this to our audience. Thank you very much.

Great. Thank you so much.

And to all the listeners, thank you very much for listening to another week of the Talking Biotech podcast. Share this with a friend. Help share the idea that there still are disparities in the innovation space between the sexes, and that it's important that we resolve those, and that there are companies working to do just that, especially for some issues in women's health that may Maybe aren't that common and maybe are not life-threatening, that certainly do improve quality of life. This is the Talking Biotech Podcast, and we'll talk to you again next week.