16th Annual Patient Day
Your Mother Should Know, Your Doctor Should Know Better!
Patient Day - March 2, 2025
Einhorn Auditorium
Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City
Scientific Director
Dan Martin, MD
Program Director
Tamer Seckin, MD
Thank you, Tamara. Next I'd like to introduce Dr. Praye Beim, who is the founder and CEO of Celmatics, and also a board member for the Endometriosis Foundation of America. Somatics has pioneered genomics and data science to advance women's health. She's a recent recipient of an ARPA grant from the federal government and the White House Initiative on women's health. She leads somatics in developing a novel JNK inhibitor that targets pain and endometriosis. This new drug is created using DEC Tech technology at Baylor College of Medicine and aims to address unmet needs for treating endometriosis, PCO and advanced aging.
Thank you, Dr. Martin. How you guys? So I'm wearing my endometriosis outfit today, which I finally figured out in my forties. If you're in pain, don't wear jeans, don't wear the Spanx. Just find the outfits that work for you. So I found some work. Okay. Yoga pants, basically. So I say this because my period started yesterday, and for the people in this room, you know what that means. It was a rough day. I had to let a bunch of people down, had to let my kids down, wasn't able to come here and interact with my colleagues.
I'm 46. It took me decades to get to a place where I could have a day one like yesterday if, okay, so if you guys are a little bit younger than me, this is my first gift to you this morning. Is it's okay on day one or day two or however many days you're debilitated around your period to just say no. No is a new yes. Okay. Yes to your body and to your needs. Everybody's going to be fine. Okay, so good morning. So I've been innovating in women's health for about 25 years. Part of what motivates me is no one could give me the answers that I needed to understand what in the world was happening with me. I grew up thinking I was a pain wimp. I learned later I'm a pain warrior. You all are pain warriors too. What I've learned in my 25 years as a scientist and researcher in this field is that because our disease is not treated, we are sensitized to pain. We have a biologically different body than people who don't have to grow up living with what we do. But even though we are biologically more sensitive to pain, we also are more tenacious and able to cope with it and function with it because it is just normal for us.
I found out how tenacious I was when I gave birth to my second son. I didn't know at that time what it felt like to go into labor naturally because with my first son, I had preeclampsia and it was an emergency delivery, and as a scientist, what I learned later is that the same risk factors it gave me, endometriosis also explained why I had preeclampsia and why me and my son both almost died. Same untreated disease with my second son, because I knew I was at risk. I was able to manage lifestyle factors, get him to the finish line. So I went into labor and there I was having a minute long contraction every four minutes, which for those of you who know the kind of textbook, that's when you go to the doctor and you say, I'm ready. I called my doctor and I said, I'm ready.
It's happening one minute every four minutes. She said, no, no, there's three checked boxes. The third one is it has to hurt worse than a typical period. Are you having a contraction right now? And I said, yeah. She said, you're fine. Don't come into the hospital. If you were having a real contraction, you wouldn't be able to be talking to me right now. When I got there, basically he almost came out right there in the waiting room. I mean, we barely made it because my mom finally said, just go. What I learned in that moment, and I have never forgotten that, and I like to share that anecdote, is that I was living and functioning at work at school in my life with the level of pain that gets dramatized in movies is people screaming and holding onto something, right? That was just a typical period.
So I was like, well, I'd never have an unmedicated period. So yeah, I guess this feels like a typical period, and when I told that story on a call with another scientific researcher in our space at Harvard, she wrote me a letter after the call and she said, I had the same birth story. Subject heading was from one tenacious woman to another. So I'm starting with all of that just so you guys understand that I, I'm here because I have this disease. I'm here because I didn't get answers. I'm here because I have a daughter who's inherited these genetic risk factors from me, and I'm here because I inherited these genetic risk factors from my grandmother and my mother, who when I had my first horrendous period, I've never had a good one. She said, well, that just happens to some of the women in our family.
It's just part of being a woman. I accepted that for a really long time, and then finally about 25 years ago, I stopped accepting that and I decided to do something about it. So fast forward, I'm a board member of the Endometriosis Foundation of America. This is a big year for us. 2025 is a really big year for us. We're going to be making some announcements over the next couple of weeks that really are going to set the future of our field. I've been here for almost about 10 years. I originally met Dr. Seskin the way a lot of us do, which is he was my surgeon and he was the first person who looked at me and definitively said, oh, you definitely have endometriosis. So there was satisfaction, there was peace and diagnosis because I could start to educate myself a little bit more about what I could do. I had an explanation at least in my head, even though I wasn't ready until many years later to tell people I have endometriosis. My period just started. I need to cancel my meetings today. Sorry.
But that was my beginning of my endo journey of understanding that I had endo as a researcher. I started off in what was called reproductive health, and I started off thinking endometriosis was a reproductive condition, and that's in part why we have so little funding is because when we take conditions that impact our uterus or our ability to get pregnant sometimes, and we call them reproductive conditions, what that means for the world is they get minimized. Reproduction feels like a nice to have, even though over 90% of women want to have a baby, somehow, we consider that a nice to have. Part of my research journey in understanding this disease and advocating for this disease has been to say, we have to stop calling it reproductive. You just saw Dr. Kin talk about how many different things you guys are experiencing them. Well, into my journey of trying to understand this reproductive condition, I started learning that it impacts urinary function, it impacts digestive function, and as we started to decode really what it means on a molecular level, what does that really mean when you have endometriosis, what are the molecules that are not functioning correctly?
What does that mean for the cells in your body? What we learned is that it's not just reproductive. Yes, it is influenced by hormones that also are important for reproductive. Yes, it impacts parts of your body that are important for reproduction, but at its root, endometriosis is about six different pillars of biology that get disrupted, and one of the big ones is immune function. And this helps explain why so many women who have endometriosis are also predisposed to get autoimmune disorders. It is in part A under and overreaction of your immune system. So when we hear about things like inflammation is part of your immune system and we think of inflammation as bad, but it's actually really important for your body, it's important for fighting disease. When you have an infection and you have a lot of good inflammatory processes in your body that have to work correctly, menstruation is inflammatory, ovulation is inflammatory.
So for whatever reason, some of us aren't able to ramp up and then ramp down inflammation in a productive way on those local levels. And when you have systemic inflammation, so this is a body that is chronically stressed, sleep deprived, full of refined sugars, et cetera, exposed to air pollution, things that we know are risk factors for endometriosis. What it means is that it makes it really even harder for your body to do something that maybe it's not wired to do naturally. So there's a lot of things that we've learned, and we're going to be sharing a lot more as we learn really molecularly what this disease is and what that translates into what you can do with your lifestyle. But the last thing that I will say that I think is a really, really important message is that we can't do it all with lifestyle.
Not everyone can access surgery, and even if you can, there's a high recurrence rate for all of the interventions that we have right now. You can take painkillers, it's going to come back. You can suppress your hormones, it's going to come back. You can't suppress your hormones forever. That's not healthy. You can have surgery. It often comes back. What I'm working on, which Dr. Martin mentioned in which the foundation is going to really start pushing, and you're going to see some announcements on the research front later this year are insights, research insights that really lead to treatments. And I want to say this because as a foundation, we really navigate uncomfortably this interface with the private sector. Pharma doesn't have a great rep, not in our field, but we can't actually do it without them, and we need real cures for this disease. And so part of what we're grappling with as a foundation is how do we engage with pharmaceutical companies?
How do we engage with biotechs in a way that helps 'em understand? It's not that patients don't want cures. It's not that we're anti-drug companies. It's that we're anti the fact that they're not doing good enough. We have to do better, and we can't just keep suppressing women's hormones as the only way to treat this disease. We have to go after root causes and after the biology. So Dr. Martin mentioned I'm working on a pioneering drug program that I believe will be the first real cure for this, and it's something that I can't do without pharma either. Ultimately, my company has to partner with a big pharma company, but I just want you guys to know and just understand that the foundation has tried for a really long time to stay as neutral, patient-centered, and really not engage with pharma. But that makes it hard for us because it means that they can't really hear from us.
We don't have a seat, the table with them. One of the biggest things I hear from pharmaceutical companies is, I'm not going to develop a drug that might impact a baby if a woman accidentally gets pregnant, but that's not fair. There's so many conditions, including autoimmune disorders or cancer, that women are allowed to take drugs to heal their body, and they're trusted and treated as adults to not get pregnant while they're on those drugs. And unfortunately for this disease, drug companies won't develop drugs for our bodies in case we accidentally get pregnant. So these are the types of barriers that we have to really hit head on and work with these companies on. And so the foundation sees a big role in that. So I just wanted to share that as you guys learn more about me and my work, and as the foundation starts to lean into things that are more translational, meaning we're going to take basic research, we're going to move it into drug development pipelines that can actually impact your lives, impact my life. The last thing I'll say is that this one's always hard for me to say. When my daughter sees me in pain, she's eight. She says, are your medicines going to be ready in time for me?
I hope they will, but we need everybody's help to get there. So anyway, I just wanted to share so you guys know who I am and know that there's a lot of good indoor warriors that are not just advocating for you, but are part of your community and are in the private sector in biotech, and we are working to really try to cure this disease. Okay, nice to meet you all.
