Breaking New Ground for Women’s Health

The working days of any tech company founder are guaranteed to be busy and unpredictable. But even by the standards of the San Francisco Bay Area’s dynamic start-up scene, Morgan Stanton’s routine is a bit unusual.

Stanton, PhD ’14, is the CEO of Opal Therapeutics, a biotechnology company pioneering a new approach to women’s reproductive health. Despite a flood of recent advances in biotech, this field is understudied and underfunded, and Stanton has had to get creative to find the biological materials she needs to perfect and prove her groundbreaking technology.

“There are very few biobanks that exist of female tissue,” she explains. While biotechnology researchers can order samples of many different human tissues, provided by donors and shipped around the country, the myriad cells found in the human uterus are frustratingly hard to come by. “We do collect surgical samples—I work with some clinics that actually ship me tissue patients have donated,” she says. “But I also collect menstrual effluent from women in the Bay Area that contains many cell types we can use.”

Bold, unusual, and elegant in its simplicity, the solution is also characteristic of Stanton, who brought the same unconventional problem solving to her investigations as a graduate student at WPI, as a postdoctoral researcher in Germany, and in the fast-paced world of Bay Area biotech. Her innovative approach and unique way of looking at the world are now aimed at a healthcare revolution—one that stands to benefit half the human population.

Officially launched in September 2023, Opal Therapeutics’s main offering is what Stanton calls “a uterus in a dish,” an in vitro model of the womb integrated with artificial intelligence analysis, which can accelerate the discovery and development of new drugs targeting gynecological diseases and disorders, such as uterine fibroids and endometriosis. These conditions, which can be very painful and may make it difficult for women to bear children, are now often treated with surgery. Opal Therapeutics aims to make it easier to develop more effective and less invasive treatments.

“Right now, people do drug testing in rodents, and guess what … rodents don’t have a menstrual cycle,” Stanton says. “I won’t go into the details, because it can get kind of gross, but to think that a drug tested in a mouse’s uterus is going to translate perfectly to a woman in the clinic is just crazy.”

Indeed, rodents are an imperfect substitute for humans in general, and in recent years scientists in search of better options have made great strides in creating so-called “organoids” to serve as models of everything from the intestines to the brain. These miniature three-dimensional organs, which are created by culturing human cells and growing them in a bioreactor, are used in basic research to better understand developmental processes, and they also prove to be superior models for testing new drugs. Opal’s microscopic uterine organoids, which the company grows by the tens of thousands, can be used to screen many different compounds at once. They can even be personalized to individual patients to account for variabilities among women.

“There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in women’s health,” Stanton says. “And drugs that are developed have a 90 percent fail rate when they get to patients. We want to try to reduce that by starting at the research and development level.”

Opal got a vital boost when it was selected for the Fall 2024 cohort of the Techstars Accelerator program in downtown San Francisco. Participation in the three-month session comes with a sizable investment, hands-on mentorship, shared office space, and access to a wide network of other entrepreneurs. It’s been an intensive learning experience, and that puts Stanton right in her comfort zone.  

“The other founders are in very different fields—health tech, but also gaming and finance—but we can riff on ideas with each other,” she says. “I feel like I’m an eternal student, so I love hearing about what they’re building and the challenges they’re solving.” 

Stanton, whose PhD is in chemistry, arrived with a strong hard-science background. But Techstars has helped her brush up on the business side of entrepreneurship. “I had never taken a business course before,” she says, “so coming into this I was a bit nervous about how to translate my research into a business proposal and plan. Techstars has really helped me to accelerate that process, and to improve sales outreach and my value add as the company grows. It’s been a game changer.”

While she may not have taken business courses here, Stanton’s interest in entrepreneurship dates to her time at WPI. But her affection for WPI itself, like her love of chemistry, goes even further back. Although her family’s finances may have dictated that she attend the public in-state college (University of New Hampshire) at the undergraduate level, Stanton fulfilled a long-standing ambition when she enrolled in a PhD program at WPI immediately after earning her bachelor’s degree. It turned out to be an ideal place to pursue her passion for research. 

“The chemistry department is very intimate, and I really enjoyed that quite a bit,” she recalls. “I had a lot of freedom. We were a small team, but I got to interact with the whole department all the time. Everyone’s door was always open. I could walk down the hall to a different lab. The biology department was above us, bioengineering was on the third floor, and I would go in between. My research now is a lot of the same thing—a combination of chemistry, tissue engineering, molecular biology. So I think having that experience of multidisciplinary work definitely shaped my approach to the complicated problems we’re trying to solve at Opal. One discipline isn’t going to cut it.”

Stanton’s eagerness to collaborate, as well as her dedication to asking and answering tough questions, stood out to her advisors.

“She was certainly one of the best graduate students I ever had,” says Professor Christopher Lambert. “She’s a true scientist.” With Lambert, Stanton was working on a project to create superhydrophobic surfaces—that is, surfaces that are extremely resistant to water. At the same time, they were growing mammalian cells for another experiment, and Stanton got to wondering what would happen if the two projects were combined. What if they grew the cells on a superhydrophobic surface?

Lambert was dubious, but he said she could give it a try.

“And the cells did grow, in an entirely different way,” he says.

“I was their second employee,” she remembers. “I just had fun. It was such a good time! And then I moved on to another, and although I really enjoyed that work environment, it was always in the back of my mind to start my own.”

In 2023, Stanton was working as director of discovery biology at Herophilus, a company working on neurotherapeutics via brain organoids, when the company was acquired by the biotech titan Genentech. The moment suddenly seemed right to take a leap.

“I was like, what else is holding me back? Why not now?” she remembers.

Stanton built Opal Therapeutics from experience gained over five years at VitroLabs and Herophilus, and on research skills she honed at WPI. But she also brought to it a sense of purpose derived from personal experience.

In Germany, Stanton was diagnosed with uterine fibroids, noncancerous growths that can cause pain and complications, including anemia and infertility. As common as uterine fibroids are, many women have difficulty getting the condition diagnosed and treated. For Stanton, it was a five-year saga before she ever entered an operating room.

“The surgery went fine,” she says. “I had a great surgeon, and the fibroids haven’t come back, but it caused complications with my pregnancy. And then there’s always the possibility they could come back, and no one knows why. That lack of insight—and the fact that no one wanted to find out why—always bothered me.”

The lack of progress when it came to women’s health—contrasted with the flourishing of innovation in other segments of biotech—convinced Stanton that there was a market for a new approach.

“Medical research mostly has had male leaders, and male health has been top of mind,” she says, bluntly. “Fifty years, and it’s been the same. People just get used to the status quo. But we need to break out of that cycle and get a fresh start in industry. Oncology doesn’t have this issue. Neurobiology doesn’t have this issue. So why are we keeping women’s health in the past? It too needs to modernize. And, meanwhile, the patient population is there and there’s money to be made.”

That’s part of the case Stanton has been making to early investors—venture capitalists, or “VCs” in the lingo of the industry, who are mostly men.

“One part of my pitch that I think other founders don’t have to worry about quite so much is education,” she remarks. “Everyone knows what Alzheimer’s is. But even with increased public awareness, many people don’t know what endometriosis is, or uterine fibroids. That means I have to go into detail, explaining how these conditions impact women’s lives. So that’s always a bit of education for the VCs.”

But simply raising awareness is not enough—Stanton also has to convince her audiences that her start-up offers a sure path to profitable drug development. For that, she relies on her own experience in the industry, and on the proven concept that underlies Opal Therapeutics.

“We’re not just starting with some kind of vague research idea, this is a specific path we can follow over five years to make sure patients get therapeutics,” she explains. “This idea has been done before in other areas, even if I am breaking new ground for women’s health.”

Stanton’s clear-eyed vision has already convinced many in the Bay Area biotech scene, including Alexia Krispin, a strategic advisor at the entrepreneurship hub Berkeley SkyDeck, who joined Opal’s board of advisors.

“She had clearly thought through not just the science, but how to build a company that could translate that science into real-world impact,” says Krispin. “This isn’t just incremental innovation—it’s a transformative approach to studying women’s health conditions in ways that weren’t previously possible.”

Stanton’s stint at Techstars ended in December, and she was looking forward to a well-earned vacation. With January would come the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, a massive convention that would bring biotech companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and investors from around the world to San Francisco. It would be a chance to forge relationships across the industry, and to position Opal for growth in 2025.

Before that big event, though, Stanton took a little time to reflect. What sort of advice would she give a younger version of herself, perhaps a graduate student working in a lab at WPI, who dreamed of creating a company that could change people’s lives?

“Go for it!” she says. “It is scary, but I found this whole past year so rewarding. It’s really fulfilling to work on your own project, to build from the ground up—and knowing that my work, one day, will be helping people. I’m proud of what we did so far, and even if all I can say is that I’ve helped women in the field, or I’ve helped female scientists, I will see that as a success.

“But I am hoping Opal will keep going for the next five, 10 years, and beyond.”