Menopause, a natural transition marked by end of menstruation and a steep decline in reproductive hormones, starts to affect almost all women between the ages of 45 and 55.¹

Despite the condition's ubiquity, menopause treatments remain difficult to access; while most post-menopausal women said menopause had interfered with their lives,² 73% never treat their symptoms.³

Existing therapeutics like Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) have been linked to concerning side effects like breast cancer, blood clots, and stroke,⁴ while prohibitive cost cultural barriers and societal inequity create barriers to access.⁵

HRT access ranges widely across various ethnic groups, pointing to a worrying trend in women's healthcare access. Figure adapted from "Racial/ethnic disparities in the diagnosis and management of menopause symptoms among midlife women veterans," Blanken et. al., 2022.

Our project expands the human body's natural ability to convert daidzen, a soy product, into equol, which behaves like estrogen. By increasing efficiency of equol production from its chemical precursor, daidzein, we hope to reduce the cost of equol synthesis.

By recreating the daidzein-equol pathway in bacteria, we are contributing to a the developemnt of a more natural, scalable, and accessible alternative to HRT.