September 2024: Selected Women's Health Updates

The month of September was in rich in investment announcements - but not only. Let’s have a look!

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?

July 2024 Women’s Health Updates

August 2024 Women's Health Updates

Investments and deals:?

• Curio raised over $10 million in first-round financing that will be used to fund the rollout of its DTx app for postpartum depression (PPD), which earlier in April got the 510(k) FDA clearance.
• The French Sonio, a AI-powered cloud-based ultrasound reporting software, got acquired by Samsung. Sonio aims at helping sonographers, OB/GYNs and Fetal surgeons to perform their routine fetal ultrasound examinations in real time.?In 2023 Sonio received the 510(k) FDA clearance.
• The Indian Newmi Care, an outpatient care platform & clinics focused on women?health and wellness, raised $1.5 M.
• More early stage investments into female reproductive health inclusion workplace platfrom HeyFlow and into Vivian Lab addressing the menopause gap by integrateing menopause education, telehealth, personalised treatment plans and more.

Research updates:

• Sept 2d: An AI-enabled digital stethoscope helped doctors identify twice as many cases of heart failure compared to a control group that received usual obstetric care and screening. The research was presented at the?European Society of Cardiology Congress ?on a?Mayo Clinic ?study, the full?study findings are published in Nature Medicine .

The randomized, controlled, open-label clinical trial included nearly 1,200 participants who were screened for heart conditions through typical obstetric care or AI-enhanced solutions. The trial was conducted in Nigeria, where more women experience pregnancy-related heart failure than anywhere in the world. Within the study cohort, the digital stethoscope helped flag twice as many cases of low ejection fraction <50% and doctors using it were 12-times more likely to identify an ejection fraction <45% as compared to usual care.

• Sept 11th: New research, published in Nature , found 4 genes with some of the largest known effects on the timing of menopause discovered to date, providing new insight into links between menopause timing and cancer risk.

The researchers investigated the role of rare damaging variants in ovarian aging. They used whole-exome sequencing data of 106,974 postmenopausal female participants in the UK Biobank?and performed individual gene burden association tests.Together, the study identified 9 age at natural (ANM) genes, increasing the number of genes implicated in ovarian aging by identifying rare protein-coding variants. Effect sizes ranged from 5.61 years earlier to 1.35 years later ANM compared to the maximum effect size of 1.06 years reported for common variants.

• Sept 25th: The Finnish study (Human Reproduction) finds that women with premature ovarian insufficiency, whose periods stop before 40, have a much greater risk of severe autoimmune diseases.

Premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) affects 1% of women globally. The understanding of the etiology, diagnosis and optimal intervention strategies for this condition remains poorly understood: in about 90% of cases , the exact cause of POI is unknown.

The study has found that women with POI are twice to three times as likely to develop severe autoimmune conditions such as type 1 diabetes, overactive thyroid, lupus and inflammatory bowel disease, compared with the general population.

The researchers followed almost 20,000 women for at least 12 years. They analysed health data from Finland’s comprehensive registries and identified almost 4,000 women under 40 with a POI diagnosis between 1988 and 2017. Overall, women were 2.6 times more likely to have an autoimmune disease before a POI diagnosis when compared with the control group. These risks varied from nearly double for overactive thyroid glands and rheumatoid arthritis to nearly 26 times for polyglandular autoimmune diseases.

The authors want to study the biological mechanisms of POI and autoimmune diseases to help the development of preventive treatments.

Country updates:

• Sept 24th:????? Two national networks in Canada, Heart & Stroke and Brain Canada , secure $10M in funding for women's heart and brain health research.

Each network will receive $5M in funding over five years to better understand women's risk factors for heart and brain conditions and to improve the diagnosis and treatment of conditions more common among women or that are less well studied.

Earlier in August, Femtech Canada submitted a request to the Canadian government, advocating for $100M investment to accelerate women's health and femtech innovation across the country.

• Sept 24th: ???? Jill Biden announced the Pentagon intends to commit $500 million to women’s health research as part of a broader White House push to increase funding for the study of women’s health.

In March 2024 the US president signed the executive order on women's health to expand and improve how the US federal government funds health research about women. The order called on investment of $12 billion in new funding for women’s health research.