Ten Inspiring Innovations For Women’s Health

Last week the Women’s Health Innovation Summit (WHIS) Europe, took place in Basel, Switzerland. WHIS is first and foremost a networking event where entrepreneurs, researchers, and industry partners are united, all passionate about women’s health under one roof. The opening speech was held by Ida Tin, the founder of the menstrual tracking app Clue who coined the term FemTech to help fuel the discussions around, and highlight companies working for, women’s health.

Most inspiring was the startup pitching session, where ten newly founded FemTech companies could pitch their solutions for improving women’s health. The companies covered many parts of a woman’s health journey. The winner of the pitching competition was Egal pads. They are mainly targeting younger women but are useful for every menstruator. Under the device that all bodily fluids should be treated equally, Egal pads are dispensing menstrual pads in a roll form, akin to toilet paper. This product is designed to be mounted on existing toilet paper dispensers or with Egal’s custom-designed dispensers, ensuring that pads are readily available right where they are needed, inside bathroom stalls. This brilliant idea addresses the common issue of inaccessible or empty menstrual product vending machines, offering a more reliable solution for menstrual care. The initial idea was to introduce their product to schools, but currently their biggest customer is Disneyland.

Endometriosis concerns women at any stage of their menstruating years and almost one out of ten women suffers from the condition. The diagnostic journey is notoriously long and takes on average 7.5 years. This is something EndoCure would like to change. They have developed an approach to diagnose the condition more accurately and efficiently. The EndoCure system combines robotics, standard ultrasound, and artificial intelligence to enhance the detection, and staging of endometriosis lesions. This system not only aids to diagnose precisely but also greatly assists to surgical planning and ongoing management of the disease.

On the fertility side, two startups were present. Research has shown up to six times greater probability of pregnancy with a healthy microbiome compared to an imbalanced microbiome, and 70% of all women with fertility issues have imbalances in their microbiome. The company HappyOne is therefore selling a specifically designed synbiotics, mixtures of probiotics (helpful gut bacteria) and prebiotics (non-digestible fibers, to target fertility issues originating from those imbalances. Oxolife, a biotech start-up, has developed an oral drug designed specifically to enhance embryo implantation, which is a challenging phase in assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization.

Once pregnant, Pregnolia aims to improve pregnancy care by providing a more reliable assessment of preterm birth risks. They have developed a medical device that measures cervical stiffness. Pregnolia’s device is designed to reduce the incidence of false positives in preterm birth diagnosis, which can decrease unnecessary healthcare interventions and costs. By halving the number of false positives, hospitals can optimize care and focus resources more effectively on genuine cases of preterm labor. This could also diminish the burden for the pregnant women that are falsely hospitalized for prevention.

There were some discussions among the audience on whether the next start-up, Bilihome, qualified as FemTech or not. Their focus is the well-being of prematurely born babies. Their mission is to transform neonatal care using a wearable phototherapy device. Newborns should indeed be everybody’s business, and not particularly a female topic but that doesn’t make their invention less exciting. The company focuses on natural care solutions that make it possible to treat newborn jaundice at home. Their wearable device allows effective blue light therapy at the same time as bonding practices like breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact take place, which are essential for both the physical and emotional health of the baby and parents.

Several companies were covering diseases that are more prevalent in women than in men. Two solutions addressed breast cancer, where 99% of all the cases are found in women. The first problem is of course to detect the cancer early for the best outcomes. This is where “The blue box” comes in by providing a fast test for breast cancer detection of biomarkers in urine. It only takes 30 minutes to get the test results with a high fidelity. This test can be a part of the clinical workflow identifying the location of the tumor, but imaging methods are still needed.

Once the treatment is started, Aura Health Technologies has a method to improve the standard of care using AI-integrated ultrasound technology to assist the surgical planning and navigation during the tumor removal procedure.

Autoimmune disease also has a higher prevalence in women, 8 out of 10 patients are women. Finding the appropriate medication for the treatment of autoimmune disease can be a long and tedious affair, and this is what dermAB.io wants to change. The company is developing a clinical decision tool for personalized therapies by analyzing biomarkers from the skin’s surface.

Bone health is another very important issue in women’s health. In the US, it is estimated that almost half of all women will eventually become osteoporotic which severely increases the risk of fractures. The worst kind of fracture, hip fractures, has a huge impact on mortality and loss of independence in older age, and most of the patients concerned are women. If osteoporosis is detected early, diet, physical activity, and maybe even medicine are efficient treatments. The company, porous, has developed a new method to improve the current state-of-the-art for detection of osteoporosis using ultrasound technology, which promises a 30% improvement compared to the current solution.

It is exciting to see all the innovation happening in the women’s health space, and what was particularly encouraging with the ten startups in the pitching competition were their convincing business models. FemTech startups have often struggled with this in the past, but we have good chances of seeing the products succeeding in the market.