July ’24: Selected Women’s Health Updates

January 2024 Women’s Health Updates?

February 2024 Women’s Health Updates?

March 2024 Women’s Health Updates

April 2024 Women’s Health Updates

May 2024 Women’s Health Updates

June 2024 Women’s Health Updates?

While the most visible news of July is definitely Flo raising over $200M in Series C funding led by General Atlantic and joining the herd of unicorns, let’s look at what else has happened this month.

• A really interesting case of patient education: a study from the?Annals of Internal Medicine shows that after women between the ages of 39 and 49 were informed about the pros and cons of mammography, more than twice as many elected to wait until they turn 50 to get screened.

Mammography screening saves lives; however, many women remain unaware of?the costs?of routine screening in their 40s — in false-positive results, unnecessary biopsies, anxiety and debilitating treatment for tumors that left alone would do no harm. The researchers in the study wanted to give women more power and choice to make an informed decision.?

Of 495 women surveyed, only 8% initially said they wanted to wait until they turned 50 to get a mammogram. After researchers informed the women of the benefits and the harms, 18% said they would wait until 50.

• Women with severe endometriosis 10 times are more likely to get ovarian cancer (a study from a team of researchers at?the?University of Utah). The research included a cohort of over 78,000 women with endometriosis and has been?published in the?Journal of the American Medical Association.

The research also found that women with any kind of endometriosis have a 4.2-fold risk of developing ovarian cancer compared to those who do not. They also have over 7 times the risk of developing type I ovarian cancer, which is slow to?develop but also does not respond well to chemotherapy.

• The?twice-yearly injection of Gilead’s lenacapavir can provide total protection against HIV infections,?demonstrating 100% efficacy?in?Phase 3 trial published New England Journal of Medicine.?

A reminder: in 2023 FDA reported that women make up the majority of people with HIV globally yet out of 18 phase 3 HIV clinical trials with 13 000 subjects in total, only 15% were women.

• A non-hormonal fertility pill, OXO-001 by Oxolife, has shown promising results from a Phase 2 clinical trial, indicating that ?OXO-001 significantly improves embryo implantation, pregnancy, and live birth rates in women undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) - a 10% increase of pregancy rate in the control group vs placebo group.

• A 500-pages report from from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US highlights women’s health gaps related to chronic conditions.

Compared to men, women experienced a 1.3–2 fold prevalence of arthritis, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, and asthma and up to 11 fold for other conditions, such as osteoporosis. The report looks into improving diagnostic tools for women, understanding women-specific factors (like hormonal fluctuations), understanding the biology of chronic conditions in women and more. Experts say, for example, that women’s diseases may present uniquely, potentially leading to misdiagnosis when using tools primarily designed for male patients.

• Alzheimer’s and women: clinical data (see the Bloomberg report) suggests that women may not benefit from the new class of anti-amyloid therapies as much as men. Leqembi delayed cognitive decline by 43% for men and just 12% for women. Similar trends were observed in Biogen and Eisai’s aducanumab trials. And this is especially relevant since women make up almost 2/3 of Alzheimer's patients.

• The H1 2024 state of women’s health investment by Forbes based on PitchBook data (published a day before the Flo round announcement), shows an overall slight 3% increase compared to the previous high midyear record, which was $660.02M in 2022. This means women’s health could see the highest fundraising level in 2024 than it has seen in the past few years.

The average deal size has been increasing as well, however, when it comes to leadership of these women’s health companies, male CEOs and male founders still have an advantage over women when it comes to raising capital.

See more on the topic here.