Three careers, three disciplines, one shared insistence on proof.
An endocrinologist, a health psychologist and a surgical oncologist turned regulator don’t often share a byline. Here, they share a framework.
Dr Florence Comite has spent her career arguing medicine should act before diagnosis, not after. Dr Elissa Epel proved that stress leaves a measurable, biological fingerprint on how women age. Dr Stephanie Kuku has sat on both sides of the evidence question, treating patients, then deciding what proof a company must show before it can make a claim at all. Three careers, three disciplines, one shared insistence on proof, and each has shaped a different letter of The LYMA P.O.W.E.R. Index.
Every benchmark that sets a credible standard needs a credible source – the logic speaks for itself.
And it is one of the founding principles behind The LYMA P.O.W.E.R Index. Built on the same logic as a credit rating for a bond, it’s a framework designed to give women a consistent, evidence-based way to judge whether any health purchase – a supplement, a diagnostic scan, or a topical skincare – is a sound investment or an unnecessary spend.
And the authority of the Index rests on the three women whose research and clinical expertise have helped LYMA shape it and bring it to life: Dr Florence Comite, Dr Elissa Epel and Dr Stephanie Kuku.
Each woman has influenced a different part of the framework. Comite’s decades in precision medicine are why the Index demands a claim hold up for one specific body, not a population average.
Epel’s research into stress and cellular aging is the reasoning behind why the value of a health purchase should compound over years, not a single purchase.
Kuku’s regulatory background is the reason why the Index demands knowledge is converted into action a woman can actually sustain.
The combined expertise of Comite, Epel and Kuku provides the foundation and logic behind the Index – and the five questions it is built around, letter by letter.
Proven. Is it backed by credible science and measurable evidence?
Outcomes. Does it improve meaningful long-term health outcomes, not just promises?
Whole-System. Does it understand the interconnected biology of women’s health, rather than treating isolated symptoms?
Empowering. Does it increase understanding, confidence and agency over your own health?
Return. Does it create lasting value for your future health, or simply short-term optimization?
Three women with three different career paths and one shared desire for proof.
Here’s how each of them has helped guide LYMA’s pioneering P.O.W.E.R Index.
Dr Florence Comite: the case for proactive medicine
Dr Comite is an endocrinologist and clinician-scientist, founder of the Comite Center for Precision Medicine & Healthy Longevity, and author of Invincible: The New Science of Healthy Longevity.
Her career has been built on a single, persistent complaint about conventional medicine: it waits.
“The issue with conventional medicine is it’s all reactive, not proactive. For years, I would change the term ‘prevention’ to ‘proactive medicine.’”
Dr Florence Comite
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A reactive model treats the body section by section – a hormonal complaint here, a metabolic flag there. It only intervenes once something has already gone wrong. Comite’s clinical practice, and her contribution to the Index, argues for the opposite: reading the body as one interconnected system, and acting on its signals years before they become diagnoses.
“Regularly trained clinicians aren’t trained to look at system disorders at the whole body. Medicine still trains people to stick in their lanes... but the whole field of hormones, metabolism, neurotransmitters, how they affect the entire system, it’s something to be understood together.” Dr Florence Comite
She’s equally direct about the noise women are navigating to get there.
“The women’s health conversation has expanded, but people recognize they don’t know what they don’t know. They want answers, yes, but increasingly they don’t know who to trust.” Dr Florence Comite
It’s Comite, too, who supplies the Index’s clearest metaphor for its final letter, Return. “Just like a 401(k), where you’re steadily putting money away for retirement, you can build your own health portfolio over time, making small, consistent investments that ultimately help you live a better quality life,” says Dr Florence Comite.
Comite grounds Proven and Outcomes in decades of precision-medicine practice – the demand that a claim survives when the question, “what does this specific intervention mean for my body?” is asked.
Dr Elissa Epel: the biology of stress made measurable
Dr Epel is a health psychologist, professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of UCSF’s Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion Center.
Her landmark research, which is among the most cited in the science of aging, found that high levels of perceived stress can shorten telomeres by an amount equivalent to an extra decade of biological aging. It was proof, published well before “biohacking” entered the vocabulary, that stress isn’t just an emotional state. It’s a biological input with a measurable cost.
That finding is precisely why her presence on the panel matters: it moves the Index beyond skin and supplements and into the systems that actually govern long-term health.
“Alongside the biological hallmarks of aging, we also need to focus on the social hallmarks of aging. Stress, socioeconomic conditions and life experiences are among the strongest predictors of women’s long-term health and longevity.” Dr Elissa Epel
Epel is also the source of the Index’s most useful corrective to short-termism. Asked what actually moves the needle on aging, her answer isn’t a device or a protocol, it’s consistency.
“Lifestyle becomes one of our most important levers for slowing biological aging, in ways that are scientifically supported, free, and accessible to the population at large. Lifestyle wins over pharmacotherapeutics. It has one of the largest effects, and part of that is because lifestyle is lifelong, and its effects are cumulative.” Dr Elissa Epel
And crucially, she notes there’s no expiry date on this working.
“The mechanisms that slow aging in midlife continue to work decades later, which is why environment-led intervention pays off whenever it’s introduced.”
Dr Elissa Epel
Epel grounds Whole-System and Return in hard data on how stress and lifestyle compound over a lifetime, not a single season.
Dr Stephanie Kuku: turning knowledge into due diligence
Dr Kuku brings a different, equally necessary lens: a surgical oncologist and clinical AI strategist, now Chief Regulatory & Science Affairs Officer at Conceivable Life Sciences. Her career has put her on both sides of the same question: as a surgeon, she’s used clinical evidence to treat patients; as a regulator, she’s decided what evidence a company must show before it can make a claim at all. That’s why she’s quick to spot when a marketing claim is skipping the proof.
Her central argument reframes the entire problem the Index is trying to solve. It isn’t that women lack information.
“Women already know the foundations of good health. The real opportunity is helping them turn that knowledge into actions they can sustain, in doing the due diligence in a crowded market.”
Dr Stephanie Kuku
The wellness industry usually assumes the problem is a lack of information, so it keeps producing more content. Kuku is arguing for a different approach: women already know the basics, what’s missing is a way to act on that knowledge with confidence in a crowded, noisy market. It’s why the Index is built as a decision-making tool rather than another source of content.
“Our hormones make it so: estrogen is connected to every part of the body. It’s the driver of everything in the body, and as such, if women understood their health in terms of a systems view... they’d be able to do far better due diligence.” Dr Stephanie Kuku
And she offers the panel’s most consequential observation about where the science behind LYMA Skincare – and every other health claim – is now coming from.
“Twenty years ago, scientific discovery largely belonged to universities and pharmaceutical companies. Today, some of the most ambitious research into aging, skin biology and prevention is being driven by consumer health and beauty companies themselves. That’s fundamentally changing where innovation comes from.” Dr Stephanie Kuku
Kuku grounds Empowering in the regulatory instinct to ask what evidence is actually for, and in the recognition that the industry itself has changed who’s doing the research.
Why the combination of three formidable women matters
Together, an endocrinologist, a health psychologist and a clinical oncologist turned regulator are not offering three versions of the same encouragement to “prioritize your health.” They’re offering three independent audits of what that phrase should actually require before it earns a woman’s money, time and trust. That’s what separates the POWER Index from a wellness slogan – and it’s why its credibility was never going to come from the acronym alone. Read more expert perspectives in the LYMA Journal.
Meet the framework these three experts helped build, and see it applied to LYMA’s own skincare science.
