THE ARISING · Longevity & Healthspan
AthenaBio Founder Laura Minquini on Funding Research Into Ovarian Aging
Women tend to live longer than men, but one founder in the field argues that many of those extra years come with poorer health, and that longevity science has not done enough to explain why.
Laura Minquini founded AthenaDAO and now leads AthenaBio, two groups focused on female health and longevity. She spoke with Arkadi Mazin of Lifespan.io. This is an interview, so what follows is her view, not the finding of a study.
Her central claim is about menopause. "I don't think women are going to have longevity unless we figure out that part of the equation," she said. According to Minquini, women live longer but spend more of that time postmenopausal, which she calls "in many ways a compromised state of health." She said the goal is for women not to spend a third of their lives in that state.
Minquini says she is not a scientist. She began as a fashion editor, moved into trend forecasting in Paris, and later co-ran a consumer tech company that made licensed accessories for Apple in Europe. After the company was sold, she volunteered with her dog at retirement homes and became interested in how people age. A friend then introduced her to Jennifer Garrison, who was working on ovarian aging. Minquini said that meeting changed her focus.
She also describes a funding gap. VitaDAO, which she calls the first longevity DAO, raised millions of dollars in a token auction. A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization: a group with a shared mission whose members buy tokens to vote on what to fund. Minquini says she tried to present her project there, but no one was interested in funding women's health or ovarian aging. About four years ago she started AthenaDAO to fund translational research for women's health.
AthenaBio is the next step. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, separate from AthenaDAO, which continues to advance the projects it funded and to serve as an advocacy network. According to Minquini, AthenaBio aims to get more capital allocated to the field. Its thesis, which she says took four years to form, is that the biggest unlock is data. The portion of the interview available to us does not detail how that data effort will work.
Minquini is also critical of quick fixes. She said real change will not come from supplements, meditation, red light or protocols, but from therapies. The interviewer called those quick fixes "Band-Aids" and raised GLP-1 drugs and weight gain as an example; Minquini agreed that one drug changed everything. That is her opinion, and the interview presents no trial evidence on ovarian aging.
What to watch next
How AthenaBio turns its focus on data into specific research projects, and whether more funding for ovarian aging follows.
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