Better Ovarian Cancer Diagnostics Are Being Developed by This Femtech Startup

Long known as a “silent killer,” ovarian cancer wouldn’t claim nearly as many women’s lives as it does each year if reliable early screening were available. But as we learn on this episode of the Busine$$ of the V, such diagnostics have been elusive — a challenge that Oriana Papin-Zoghbi and her co-founders at AOA have taken up with a passion that has yielded amazing progress.

 

We learn about this innovative femtech startup company’s new blood test and where it is on its journey to market (stay tuned for 2025!). Co-hosts Dr. Alyssa Dweck and Rachel Braun Scherl walk through the journey from AOA’s inception through its development and what lies ahead for a diagnostic that could boost survival rates for this deadliest of cancers into the 90th percentile.

 

Early detection of the type AOA is currently moving through clinical trials and FDA approval will be a game-changer not only for women’s health care practitioners but for workplaces that lose valuable employees, insurers who pay astronomical treatment costs and families who suffer irreplaceable loss.

 

Today women with symptoms that indicate the possibility of ovarian cancer must undergo biopsies that result in removing at least one fallopian tube and ovary when only half among them will in fact turn out to have the disease. For the other half, those who receive a very scary diagnosis, it will very often have come too late to save their lives.

 

AOA’s introduction as a screening tool (first for women with symptoms and soon thereafter for those at high risk and ultimately — fingers crossed — as a general screening tool not unlike a pap smear) is beyond transformational, as is everything that Oriana has to share about the work she and her team are doing to bring this unique women-led biotech venture to life!

 

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