New Ferring Head Laments Woeful Neglect Of Women's Health

After fighting for years to bridge the gender health gap where many women receive poorer treatment than men from academia and non-profits, Kelle Moley has moved into pharma with Ferring to further her vision.

Source: Ferring

Kelle Moley

 

Having been a pioneer in woman's health for over three decades, Kelle Moley has entered into the world of pharma for the first time by joining Ferring Pharmaceuticals and pledging to tackle the inequality in clinical and medical practice that continues to blight 50% of the world's population.

Moley has had a stellar career working on basic and translational research on reproductive health issues in females throughout their lifespan, holding prestigious posts such as chief scientific officer at the US non-profit March of Dimes and deputy director of reproductive health technologies at the Gates Foundation. In September, she plunged into the pharma world to become head of science, public and medical affairs at Ferring and in a recent interview with Scrip at the Nordic Life Science Days meeting in Malmö, Sweden, she reflected on the struggle for recognition and prominence that women's health still encounters.

She said that sex inequality "starts with the medical profession itself," noting that within universities and other academic settings, obstetrics/gynaecology and reproductive biology departments "are not given the resources, they're at the bottom of the barrel and as a profession, it's not regarded as highly." Speaking about her personal experiences, Moley said: "I was called everything from a glorified midwife to a baby doctor, and not a serious surgeon and that carried over into the rest of my career, when I was a reproductive biologist and had a laboratory, as well as my clinical practice."

She said that graduate students "would come to me and say, 'all of our advisors are telling us not to go into reproductive health because there's no money in it.' This is the other problem, not only is there deprioritization of women's health in general, but there's a lack of funding. I've been in it for 35 years and it was very difficult to get funding for anything related to reproduction, or to women's health."

Clinical Trial Ban

Another issue stems from the thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s which prompted a ban on pregnant women and those of child-bearing age from participating in clinical trials. Moley said this meant that drugs were never trialled in women before 1993 and were only evaluated in post-market testing. She cited a study which showed that between 1997 and 2010, "ten drugs were pulled off the US market and eight of them were because they had serious side effects in women and they had never been tested in women."

Aside from reproductive health, she noted that in the cancer and cardiovascular fields, "it was clear that women were dying much more rapidly and in higher numbers than men. They looked back at preclinical data but it was always done in male mice and the reason for that was the same that they didn't want to do the studies in women, because hormones are fluctuating in the body and it's too complicated and too much noise."

Moley added: "If you look at the numbers, checkpoint inhibitors and immunotherapy don't work as well in women, the same with a lot of chemotherapeutic drugs. There are very few studies looking at why that is but there's a difference in your natural immunity based on estrogen levels. It's clear that we have not done enough research on differences in male versus female bodies."

She noted that when it comes to reproductive medicine, "less than 1% of total pharma dollars worldwide goes into infertility." However, there are companies who have steadily invested in the space and Ferring has been a leader with its fertility treatments but Moley noted that her remit was to lead her team to take a more holistic approach to reproductive health.

She said there was a lot of unmet medical need in endometriosis, fibroids and polycystic ovary syndrome, noting that 25% of women suffer from the latter "yet we have no treatment tailored for that." Moley added that women's health is still seen in some circles as niche "and that's part of the discrimination in some ways, but it's 50% of the population. It's a big problem and we need to bring it out of its niche category into the real world."

Potentially Lucrative Field

It is also a potentially lucrative world, she said, noting that when it comes to R&D, "it's a wide-open field and there's not a lot of competition. Not a lot of people are doing this, so it's a good cause plus unmet need." Moley was particularly enthused by the rise of 'femtech,' the term coined by entrepreneur Ida Tin to refer to the tech-driven solutions that are being advanced to address female health and wellness.

She said that "there are many more women who are in venture capital and the number of female founders and CEOs of start-ups is starting to go up. More women have gotten to science and into philanthropy and the tide is turning."

There are still not many pharmas investing heavily in women's health, with Bayer AG, Organon and Ferring being among the honorable exceptions, but Moley believes that industry collaboration can only be of benefit. She noted that Ferring was now a full member of the World Economic Forum "and we've been tasked with developing the mother and child interest area and we're doing that with Organon and Novo Nordisk A/S. This is all still in the works but we are thinking of arenas that we can engage with them and others on some level."