Dolphins age similarly to humans and can develop the same diseases, have high cholesterol, chronic inflammation and even prediabetes, Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson discovered while working as a veterinary epidemiologist. She took this finding, examined it closely alongside molecules in dolphins’ blood, and found C15:0, an essential fatty acid. It provides nutrients that the human body doesn’t make, and when it’s in foods, it’s only in present in trace amounts. After many years of research, publications and health monitoring of these dolphins, Venn-Watson decided to incorporate the essential fatty acid in a vegan-friendly, dairy-free health supplement so that humans too could get these nutrients on a daily basis.
Thus, what began as a passion for working with animals and improving dolphin health has resulted in an entrepreneurial journey of taking the science from the bay to the lab and finally to the market—and developing a product that people can take to improve health on a cellular level. It carries benefits that include strengthening cell membranes, boosting mitochondria and advancing metabolism and immune system homeostasis—essentially delivering the good ingredients while cutting out unhealthy saturated fats that come with whole fat dairy products. Research shows that a daily dose of this fatty acid lowers proinflammatory biomarkers, and this is tied to lower risk of Type 2 Diabetes, cardiovascular disease and pancreatic cancer. According to Venn-Watson’s research, the C15:0 she discovered is the first essential fatty acid to be discovered after 90 years. The supplement, which Venn-Watson’s company launched today as fatty15, is designed to be taken once a day, like a vitamin. Venn-Watson launched the product through her San Diego, California based company Seraphina Therapeutics, and raised $6.2 million in Series A funding in May led by Domain Associates.
Venn-Watson spent years on the coast before working with dolphins. She graduated from the University of California San Diego before pursuing a veterinary degree at Tufts University in Boston. Her goal was to become an epidemiologist, so she began working at the CDC in Atlanta and earned a master’s degree in public health from Emory University. Venn-Watson also worked at the World Health Organization tracking diseases. Around 20 years ago, she was recruited by the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal program to work as a civil servant in San Diego to help start a program to continually improve the health and welfare of navy dolphins. It was then that Venn-Watson witnessed the striking resemblance between elderly humans and geriatric dolphins, and shared it with the human health world.
“That really led to this path of discovery where we were able to apply advanced technologies, like metabolomics and study thousands of small molecules present in the dolphins’ blood throughout their entire lifetime, because they archived all their blood throughout their life,” Venn-Watson said. “And we were able to go through these archive samples and find which small molecules in the blood predicted dolphins that were protected against these aging associated diseases. That’s where C15:0 came from.”
After ten years of publishing peer-reviewed scientific papers illustrating the similarities, she and her husband, Dr. Eric Venn-Watson, a medical doctor with an MBA who is now the company’s COO and cofounder, realized this could impact human health too. “We need certain levels in our body in order to say healthy,” she said of the fatty acid. “If those levels get low, our health is compromised.” They involved chemists when they began working on getting the right levels of C15:0 for the supplement—aiming to keep it pure, sustainable and non-animal sourced.
On initial company formation and selling the idea, Venn-Watson credits her military family background with giving her the strength to push past hurdles startup founders face. Her husband was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 while they had a toddler at home. Venn-Watson said that period of time taught her perspective.
“When you’ve been through war and all the challenges that military families have during war, it’s all about perspective,” she said. “The ups and downs of a startup are nothing compared to how we became stronger as a family through the military. And the other part is, the military background that we have is so focused on translating, doing research, understanding the problem and fixing it. And if you’re heading in a direction that is not clearly going to fix a problem soon, you start looking in other directions.
She did, however, feel a sense of weakness at the onset due to the stigma “fatty” acid may carry—but they did the groundwork and pushed past biases. “Being a female, dolphin veterinarian, walking into a room filled with VCs and saying, I’ve discovered a saturated fat that’s good for you—you know, we didn’t have the option of saying we have an idea so crazy it might just work,” Venn-Watson said. “We had to spend years to build the team, the science, the data, the peer-reviewed publications so that we could walk into a room of VCs and say, here’s an idea so crazy and here’s how it worked.”
Venn-Watson is hopeful that fatty15 will positively impact many lives. “Knowing that we could have something that can help improve just the underpinning of global health, obesity and diabetes and all of these things putting our population at higher risk of lots of things—knowing that we have something that we think can help has been a really inspiring driver during an otherwise difficult time.”