Around a year ago, PostEra, one of C&EN’s 10 Starts-Up to Watch in 2025, shifted its focus toward developing drug candidates for fertility and polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), formerly known as polycystic ovarian syndrome. Now those efforts are paying off.
Merck KGaA has agreed to buy PostEra’s two fertility programs. The companies won’t disclose exact financials, but PostEra CEO Aaron Morris says the German firm is paying his start-up an amount in the “mid-double-digit millions.”
The two programs involve a follicle-stimulating hormone receptor agonist, for ovary stimulation in in vitro fertilization (IVF), and a luteinizing hormone–choriogonadotropin receptor agonist, which stimulates testosterone production in testes and triggers ovulation in ovaries. Crucially, both drug candidates are orally administered small molecules. If they work, they could start a shift in fertility treatments away from injected drugs.
“The status quo in IVF is that women receive a lot of injections,” PostEra chief scientific officer Alpha Lee says. “What PostEra has done is be able to create small molecules, orally available, that can stimulate the same receptors that these injections do.”
According to Lee, turning injectable hormones into pills has historically come with two major challenges. The first is that such treatments require high selectivity; other small-molecule efforts have resulted in off-target effects, such as overstimulating the thyroid. The second is metabolic stability—in particular, a suitably long half-life. PostEra used its artificial intelligence (AI) platform to predict such problems and design molecules that would overcome them.
“These programs are first in class. These are not me-toos,” Morris says. “I think a lot of the critiques leveled at AI are, ‘show me something new.’ Obviously we’ve not gone after this just to prove a point about AI, but I do think that this case study really just bolsters that with AI, yes, speed and cost are important, but qualitative improvement over the standard of care is important as well.”
Elsewhere, PostEra has partnerships with Pfizer and Amgen that cover “pretty much every therapeutic area imaginable,” Morris says. But the start-up’s internal pipeline continues to lean heavily toward reproductive and endocrinologic health. Its current focus is PMOS. Morris and Lee plan to begin clinical trials for a PMOS drug candidate early next year.
Morris says he’s received offers for the PMOS drug program, and while PostEra is open to partnerships down the line, he wants to keep development—and value—in-house for now.
“We’re pretty much the only game in town for novel PMOS treatments at this time,” Morris says. “Financially, we think there’s going to be even more upside once you can get that into the clinic.”
