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Could menopause be delayed? The answer could lead to longer lifespans for women
By Connie Chang, May 02, 2024
Yousin Suh, a geneticist at Columbia University, believes rapamycin holds a lot of promise. Used to treat some cancers, rapamycin has a strong safety record-smoothing the way for testing it in other contexts.
Suh and collaborators are currently conducting a Phase II clinical trial that will measure the ovarian reserve of subjects-between the ages of 38 and 45, when about 20,000 follicles remain-after three months of treatment with the drug.
As a geneticist, Suh is relatively new to reproductive biology. She switched fields when she was recruited to Columbia in October 2019.
“I had no biases; I knew nothing except for the fact that I was reproductively aging, and it was horrendously bad, “ Suh says. She approached the problem from her unique lens, seeking to identify the genes and molecules that were most and least active in the aging ovary.
“What we found is that in the entire tissue of the ovary, across all cell types, you see the screaming signature of mTOR activation,” Suh says.
