When it comes to women’s health, money talks

STAT News – Wednesday, August 26, 2026
By Elizabeth Cooney

The flip side of each new discovery about women’s health is a history of research neglect. Now, as federal funding becomes increasingly precarious, some advocates, academics, and executives are appealing to another incentive.

It’s called the profit motive.

If disparities in women’s health were fully addressed, a 2024 World Economic Forum report estimated, by 2040 that could boost global economic productivity annually by $1 trillion. In the U.S., that would mean recovering about $300 billion in lost economic productivity.

Now, two years after that report was released, a study has found that women researchers in the U.S. bore the brunt of federal grant terminations made under Trump administration policies, even though women historically have received less funding from the National Institutes of Health in general.

Black researchers also suffered disproportionately. As Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas who has studied the demographics of whom the NIH funds, put it, “Women and scientists of color are more likely to study topics that get caught up in the dragnet of being woke.”

NIH officials say they will issue a new strategic plan for women’s health research in coming months but gave few details and did not say whether it would include a funding increase. In the meantime, advocates are looking beyond the ivory tower to Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

And the outlook is getting brighter, a report from Silicon Valley Bank says. While venture capital investments in women’s health fell by $1.2 billion in 2025, by May 2026 early indications suggest a turnaround is underway in newer-stage companies. “Projections show a rebound in both deal volume and total women’s health funding for 2026,” the report said.

In maternal health, a JAMA Health Forum study published in July found that venture capital is, in fact, funding early-stage companies seeking to close gaps in pregnancy care delivery. But there’s a caveat: “Few focus on low-income populations or mention health equity.”

Chronic underinvestment in women’s health calls for new funding structures, Basmah Safdar, an emergency medicine physician and director of the women’s health research center at Yale School of Medicine, wrote in a Lancet commentary published Aug. 17. And she has one in mind.

“It’s called the reverse pitch. Instead of investors or industry coming in at the end of the research pipeline, these funders would instead identify a market need, secure money to pay for tech transfer and commercialization, and then create a team to combine research with its translation into a product or service that could be scaled and distributed.

“Reframing women’s health through a rigorous, biology-based framework corrects a health-care system built on incomplete science and missed opportunities,” she wrote.

Here is a look at the new calculus propelling investment in women’s health, along with portraits of a few companies exploring and exploiting the underrecognized prospects.

Where venture capital does come into play

There is a growing hunger among venture capitalists and other investors for what they see as an undertapped market.

Twenty years ago, Elizabeth Bailey, now co-founder and managing partner at the venture capital firm Foreground Capital but then at another firm, remembers the blank stares she would get when she pitched investors on targeting the underserved market for women’s health.

Since then, a more recognized women’s health investment sector has evolved around the many more entrepreneurs and dedicated women’s health funds like hers at Foreground, which she founded in 2024, and at her teams’s precursor funds at RH Capital. Generalist funds are also seeing this as an underserved area.

“If I just have a straight investor hat on, not my women’s health hat, where do I want to play to get outsized returns? It’s in areas that are the big markets, unmet needs that are slightly underfunded,” Bailey told STAT. “It is the most exciting time to invest in women’s health I’ve ever seen in my two decades in venture capital, because people are now talking about it as an investment category.”

Don’t unpop that champagne cork yet, she said. There’s still a long way to go from only about 2% of health care venture capital dollars now invested in women’s health.

But the Me Too movement, she said, unlocked women’s voices. There are more women in the rooms where finance decisions are made, too. And while it doesn’t take having diabetes to invest in diabetes treatments, female representation does appear to help in women’s health.

Science also has advanced the understanding of sex-based differences.

“It used to be the rare thing that we would see an interesting therapeutics company, and now we’re meeting with therapeutics companies three, four, five times a week,” she said. “My focus is on, how do we actually draw in more investors who believe this is an investable category? And in the process, we can improve women’s health for millions and billions of people.”

‘Doing the right thing’

For too long, researchers and business leaders alike have overlooked opportunities, the argument goes, blocked by a limited understanding of how diseases differ in women and a paucity of data on which specific areas are ripe for improvement. That picture is changing, if slowly.

“Doing the right thing scientifically is also translating into the right value-creation opportunity,” said Lucy Pérez, a senior partner at McKinsey and Company and an author of that 2024 report, prepared in collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute.

Looking deeper at the scientific literature on the standard of care for the 64 conditions focused on in the report, her team found that half the time there was no reference in the literature to sex-based differences in what women and men experience. The question had simply not been asked.

Two-thirds of the time, women had a worse outcome than men, compared with 10% of the time men fared worse than women. There was evidence of no difference only 26% of the time. And yet, for the vast majority of the time, health systems operate as if there is no difference.

“When you’re an investor and innovator saying you want to pursue an opportunity, you may be off by an order of magnitude because some of the data that’s available is undercounting that opportunity so much, that limits investment,” Pérez said in an interview with STAT.

Where would missing billions of dollars come from? If women have fewer health conditions, the report concluded, that could boost economic productivity by $300 billion.

Although women may be perceived as healthier because they tend to live longer than men, they live longer in poor health, and not all at the end of life. They face illnesses during their prime earning years, from 40 to 60 years old, a span that often coincides with caregiving.

Not just reproductive health

The health conditions disparate to women fall into three buckets: those that affect only women, those that affect women differently, and those that affect women disproportionately. There is greater urgency to address these problems in today’s climate of grant denials based on “gender ideology” that doesn’t “align with administration objectives.” The research model in place since the late 1940s faces the new challenge of political review, thanks to an administration proposal delayed until December but not dead.

Nicole Kleinstreuer, deputy director for program coordination, planning, and strategic initiatives at the NIH, has promised a refresh in the next few months of the NIH-wide strategic plan for women’s health research, one that “explicitly emphasizes innovative methods and technologies and data science to comprehensively prevent and treat conditions affecting women.”

Speaking in June at a Yale conference on accelerating women’s health research where Pérez also presented, Kleinstreuer cited potential market growth for different conditions:

• Menopause-related symptoms could increase eightfold to more than $40 billion
• Endometriosis, up to $33.5 billion
• Osteoporosis, up to almost $30 billion
• Autoimmune diseases, over $140 billion

“There’s real market forces at work here driving the case to fund women’s health research,” she said. “If you look at the flip side of that, how can increased funding for women’s health research actually provide a massive return on investment by improving quality of life and reducing societal costs?”

Delays in correct diagnoses can hurt women, of course, but they also burden the health care system and pinch pharma’s bottom line, a McKinsey analysis of 15 drugs on the market today showed.

Two blind spots

Two examples of costly failure in the U.S. health care system are heart disease and endometriosis.

Women are seven times more likely than men to have a heart condition misdiagnosed or to be sent home from a hospital during a heart attack, a landmark study said in 2000. If women are admitted to a hospital, they are less likely to leave with prescriptions to reduce their likelihood of another cardiac problem, research presented in 2024 said. These and other factors add up to women being more likely to die after a heart attack.

Yale’s Safdar learned that lesson firsthand many years ago. While more women than men were coming into her ER with chest pain, stress tests were normal in more women than men. And those women kept coming back with the same symptoms.

The NIH had just published a study showing that the biology of heart disease could be different between men and women, with small vessel disease being more common in women than large artery blockages in men.

“It was this ‘aha!’ moment for me,” Safdar told STAT in an interview. “I was taught in medical school and residency that heart disease was man’s disease.”

This lack of understanding leaves patients frustrated, misdiagnosed, and undertreated.

In endometriosis, diagnostic delays are routine, taking 10 years on average. Estimates of prevalence vary. The World Health Organization estimates that around 10% of women of reproductive age are living with endometriosis, a condition in which cells similar to the lining of the uterus grow outside the uterus, causing pain and infertility. But the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation puts the global burden between 1% and 2%. That means anywhere from 24 million to 190 million women could be affected worldwide.

“For the longest time we thought of endometriosis as a singular disease,” Pérez said. “Now we’re beginning to understand that there’s multiple pathways, and depending on how the disease manifests, the way you may intervene will look different.”

If 1 in 10 women of reproductive age have endometriosis, then that compares to the 1 in 10 people who have diabetes. There are many FDA-approved drugs for diabetes, with more than 500 more in development, Pérez said. For endometriosis, it’s under 20.

“If people are looking for what’s the next big thing after GLP-1s, this could be it,” she said, referring to the class of blockbuster obesity drugs.

Three startups and one giant

Whether it’s the next big thing or not, the three buckets of women’s health are attracting entrepreneurs and investors. But big biotechs are also in the game.

Mae Health

Maternal health fits squarely in the realm of conditions that affect women only. Mae Health is an example of Foreground Capital investing not in a drug, device, or diagnostic, but in a telemedicine-enabled program to bring doula services to women and their babies covered by Medicaid. If that sounds more like a social services mission than a business opportunity, and one ignored by most venture capital, consider insurers’ willingness to pay for preventive care when its time span is strictly limited.

About half of C-sections are not medically necessary. They cost about 50% more than a vaginal birth, requiring surgery, pain management, and other interventions. Similar cost differences can accrue for preterm births. Those babies may need NICU care for months.

Both outcomes could potentially be avoided with better prenatal care.

Insurance companies and Medicaid managed care plans may hesitate to invest in long-term prevention, seeing a lot of churn in patients before benefits accrue. But in maternal medicine, these investments in care can be made six months before the baby’s delivery date and meaningfully impact the clinical cost of care for another year. For Mae, that has meant hiring community-based doulas to help nearly 9,000 mothers, a disproportionate share of whom are Black and brown, through work with 19 health insurance plans.

How it works: If mothers in those plans typically have a C-section rate of 35% but the rate for the Mae cohort is 25%, Mae will earn dollars on that spread through value-based care agreements.

“It’s nothing novel and shiny and new,” Mae Health founder Maya Hardigan said about doing well by doing good. “It’s the things we know work, it’s getting them to the mothers most in need, and it is making sure they’re on a path to reimbursement and they’re paid for by the insurers.”

AngioInsight

Scott Burger was excited. In late July, with institutional review board approval in hand, the first of 540 patients would be enrolled in a clinical trial of AngioInsight’s product to better detect the kind of small blood vessel blockages that endanger women’s heart health. The company’s software enlists AI to interpret imaging scans that reveal plaque buildup in microvessels ferrying blood to the heart. Those are danger signs that differently affect women.

A common CT scan that traces dye injected into major blood vessels will show telltale heart attack danger in men but not women, as Yale’s Safdar learned in the ER. Half of patients leave without a diagnosis for their chest pain, Burger said, many of them women. Current testing methods to determine the plaque burden from those scans in women’s smaller vessels are costly and time-consuming. AngioInsight’s approach uses AI to mine those quickly captured images for more data in small blood vessels.

“We think that there’s several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of savings that health systems will see if they can diagnose these women earlier and help to treat them,” Burger, AngioInsight’s CEO, told STAT. “It’s significantly overdue to find a way to be able to diagnose and treat these women and give them a second chance.”

Skeletalis

Osteoporosis can affect anyone with a skeleton, but the bone-weakening disease affects women disproportionately, a fact of life for two-thirds of post-menopausal women that can lead to debilitating fractures. Treatment now consists of systemic drugs to shut down the mismatch in bone cell turnover that comes with age, when clearing out the old cells overtakes replacing them with new ones. The drugs are effective but can’t be taken indefinitely.

Skeletalis founder and CEO Ben Swanson started developing a different approach as his Ph.D. project while he was in dentistry training, research he continued in postdoctoral work. He came up with an injectable small molecule that directly inhibits an enzyme involved in degrading bone cells, tweaking the balance between bone degradation and new bone cell formation. The drug candidate is still being refined and is not yet in the clinic.

“Osteoporosis sits at this intersection of women’s health and aging and longevity,” he told STAT. “If we live longer and women want to enjoy the peak years of their lives, what are all the tools that we should have to anticipate that and make that a reality? Preventing fractures is a really good place to start.”

Regeneron

Boaz Hirshberg, senior vice president, clinical sciences and internal medicine at Regeneron, said the biotech giant is exploring treatments for many conditions women face that have not attracted investment before.

New efforts target the thyroid disorder Graves’ disease, which affects mostly women. Another is POTS, short for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which is an autonomic nervous system disorder behind an excessively fast heart rate and fainting that is more common in women. And functional hypothalamic amenorrhea (FHA), an imbalance of muscle and fat, is most often found in young female athletes who no longer have their periods.

“I believe that if we have the right scientific solution for a condition that impacts people as a whole and if it happens to be women, then you’re going to have a successful commercial program,” Hirshberg said.

Bottom line
Yale’s Safdar has another take.

“I actually now like to think of women’s health as precision medicine,” she said. “It’s a key central biological variable that changes our tests and how we interpret those tests. You’re providing better clinical outcomes, but also providing more cost-effective care.”

And, presumably, a return on investment.

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