Stephanie Venn-Watson

Company: Seraphina TherapeuticsTitle: Co-founder & CEOIndustry: Consumer productsNotable in 2024: Dr. Venn-Watson's research led to new explanations for recent increases in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and fatty liver disease in younger people.

Stephanie Venn-Watson's discovery of the first essential fatty acid to be found in more than ninety years came from a rather unexpected place: dolphins.

Venn-Watson, a veterinary epidemiologist, has spent her career studying all different sorts of animals to better understand diseases and improve both human and animal health at organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

But it was when she was tasked to improve the health of the U.S. Navy's bottlenose dolphins that she was led to her discovery.

The U.S. Navy has a program in San Diego that trains and studies dolphins, teaching them to assist in detecting, locating and recovering objects, as well as to identify threats in harbors and at sea.

The program's dolphins generally live much longer than dolphins in the wild, but much like humans, age in a similar way, showing signs of things like high cholesterol, arthritis and chronic inflammation. However, Venn-Watson found that other dolphins living in the same conditions weren't contracting certain diseases as the others, which led her and her team to study why.

The subsequent work found that the dolphins that ate fish with higher levels of fatty acid C15:0 were healthier, and when dolphins with those aging-related conditions switched to the same kind of fish, those conditions stabilized, and their cells stabilized as well.

With that discovery in hand and subsequent research to back that C15:0 was an essential fatty acid like the more commonly known omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids that could lead to better health outcomes for humans, Venn-Watson and her husband Eric, a Navy physician, co-founded Seraphina Therapeutics. The company sells a supplement, called Fatty15, which contains C15:0.

"All of this happened because of the pure intent of wanting to help older dolphins live the longest, healthiest lives possible," Venn-Watson said during a 2022 TED talk. "Showing that if we as humans combine compassion with innovation to improve life for other species, we can improve life for all."