Healthcare Tomorrow: Pitching The Future
Oct 1, 2026 · 9 min · 7 segments
Today, we're joined by Dr. Lara Zibners, co-founder and chair of Calla Lily Clinical Care, a clinical-stage company pioneering vaginal drug delivery, with applications spanning fertility, menopause…
Lara ZibnersGuestPitching The Future HostHost[gentle music] The wider problem.
Essentially, by the time you're done with life, every woman has taken a vaginal drug at some point, and they're all messy and leaky.
But stepping back, when you say vaginal drug delivery, people think that's sort of weird and niche, and it's not.
Uh, in addition to cocaine, there's a host of medications [chuckles] that belong in the nose, right? Think of even flu mist vaccines, and the vagina's part of the same mucosal immune system as the nose is, right? We put medication under our tongue because they're absorbed directly into the bloodstream without going through the GI tract, without going through the liver, where there's this hepatic first pass.
They leak horribly, and in my case, that's why my doctor said, "Oh, well, let's just go to the injected form," which is this painful intramuscular thick oil that was horrible.
So if we're gonna ask women to lie down for half hour with every dose of medication, and that's what happens with the current vaginal progesterone, um, that's popularly used in the UK and elsewhere.
The health economics on that lost productivity in the UK is £236 million per annum.
If you also include the situation with people calling their doctor and the nurse picks up and they say, "My medication's leaking," right? So the cost to the NHS and to productivity in the UK from women missing appointments, being late to work, having to lie down and just-- because, you know, we all have hours every day where we just lie down and stare at the ceiling.
After two or three, we're talking significant PTSD that months and months later, women are still suffering, and then we're asking them to take a leaky medication, and the first sign of miscarriage is vaginal discharge, and we're asking them to not worry about the medication getting to the right place in the right dose.
There, there has to be a better way, and that is, um, about bringing this conversation just about the possibility of what can and should be given vaginally to the conversation and say, "There's a better way to do this without asking women to interrupt their lives."
[gentle music] The wider problem.
Essentially, by the time you're done with life, every woman has taken a vaginal drug at some point, and they're all messy and leaky.
But stepping back, when you say vaginal drug delivery, people think that's sort of weird and niche, and it's not.
Uh, in addition to cocaine, there's a host of medications [chuckles] that belong in the nose, right? Think of even flu mist vaccines, and the vagina's part of the same mucosal immune system as the nose is, right? We put medication under our tongue because they're absorbed directly into the bloodstream without going through the GI tract, without going through the liver, where there's this hepatic first pass.
They leak horribly, and in my case, that's why my doctor said, "Oh, well, let's just go to the injected form," which is this painful intramuscular thick oil that was horrible.
So if we're gonna ask women to lie down for half hour with every dose of medication, and that's what happens with the current vaginal progesterone, um, that's popularly used in the UK and elsewhere.
The health economics on that lost productivity in the UK is £236 million per annum.
If you also include the situation with people calling their doctor and the nurse picks up and they say, "My medication's leaking," right? So the cost to the NHS and to productivity in the UK from women missing appointments, being late to work, having to lie down and just-- because, you know, we all have hours every day where we just lie down and stare at the ceiling.
After two or three, we're talking significant PTSD that months and months later, women are still suffering, and then we're asking them to take a leaky medication, and the first sign of miscarriage is vaginal discharge, and we're asking them to not worry about the medication getting to the right place in the right dose.
There, there has to be a better way, and that is, um, about bringing this conversation just about the possibility of what can and should be given vaginally to the conversation and say, "There's a better way to do this without asking women to interrupt their lives."
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
