$100m Boost for Women’s Health Research

Melinda French Gates has announced a $100 million investment into women’s health through a partnership between Pivotal (the coalition group founded by French Gates) and Wellcome Leap (a non-profit organisation). This investment will go towards two new programmes which will be launched in 2026. The research will be overseen by Wellcome Leap, using their “accelerated model” to deliver life-changing and lifesaving breakthroughs years (or even decades) sooner than we would otherwise see them.

Founded in 2015, Pivotal seeks to accelerate the pace of social progress around the world. Last year, Pivotal Ventures launched a $250 million fund that is working with non-profit organizations worldwide to improve women’s mental and physical health.

This partnership between Pivotal and Wellcome Leap will move Wellcome Leap closer towards their goal of investing $1 billion in women’s health investment, specifically under-researched conditions that disproportionately affect women.

We welcome this initiative as another significant step in closing the gender health gap. The following examples published in Pivotal’s announcement of the partnership show us the stark reality of the situation:

• Despite living longer, women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health¹.
• Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for women worldwide, yet it is still too often thought of as a "man's disease"—and frequently misdiagnosed or missed entirely when the patient is a woman².
• Women account for 80 percent of patients with autoimmune diseases, yet treatments are rarely designed with them in mind³.
• Two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women, and we still cannot explain why⁴.
• Every 16 seconds, a baby is stillborn, and forty percent of those deaths involve problems with the placenta—an organ we know astonishingly little about, despite its central role in sustaining life⁵.

Hopefully, this funding will seek to redress the imbalance in these areas and fix, what French Gates calls, “a broken status quo”.

For more information about the different types of early-stage funding for companies in the women’s health sector, see our article Navigating early-stage funding for FemTech companies in the UK: Key insights for founders and investors.

Footnotes:

[1] McKinsey Health Institute

[2] National Library of Medicine

[3] The Washington Post

[4] Alzheimer's Association

[5] World Health Organization, BJOG