Steve Butts

Steve Butts is the chief executive officer of Arrivo BioVentures, a drug-development company based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. A serial biotechnology entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience founding, financing, and exiting startups, he leads Arrivo’s pipeline of clinical-stage candidates.

Arrivo’s lead asset is a SIRT6 activator in development for major depression. In a phase 2 study of 319 patients, the drug produced a striking, unplanned result: it worked well in women and not at all in men, a finding Butts traces to research showing that men and women can express the same depression-linked genes in opposite directions. The company is now running a registration study to replicate the result.

Butts appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Jeff Fischer, president and co-founder of Longhorn Vaccines & Diagnostics, for a conversation on longevity and sex-based medicine. He defined longevity not as chasing a lifespan of 120 but as extending healthspan: slowing the biological processes of aging and preventing disease so people live longer, healthier, more functional lives.

Much of his account centered on how hard it has been to get the industry to take sex differences seriously. He recounted being asked, in apparent seriousness, whether there is “a market for a depression drug that only works in females” — a population that is two-thirds of depression patients. A drug tailored to the population it actually helps, he argued, is precisely what the system should want, and a step toward the personalized medicine the field keeps promising.