Why invest in women’s health is good for business

The most difficult part of being a pediatrician is to tell parents that their precious baby has not survived. The second harder is not to be able to explain why.

Préclampsie is an important cause of death for mothers and newborns in places like Karachi and Seattle, where I live now, but we do not know what causes them and there is no remedy.

The main reason for this fatal gap in our knowledge is negligence. According to a 2021 analysis led by McKinsey & Company, only 1% of research and health innovation is invested in specific conditions for women beyond oncology. And for the conditions that affect women and men, women are seriously under-represented in clinical trials, we have barely scratched the surface of understanding how women suffer from current conditions like cardiovascular disease.

Consequently, there is a long list of serious and omnipresent conditions without good solutions, including autoimmune diseases, heavy menstrual bleeding and endometriosis. Endometriosis causes severe pelvic pain and affects one in 10 women in the world, but it is so poorly understood that 65% of women are initially poorly diagnosed.

This is why, despite life longer than men, women spend more time in bad health – no importance where in the world they live.

Finding answers to long -standing questions about women’s health is a big engine of our gender equality work at the Gates Foundation. This is also fundamental to achieving our 20 -year goals to help end the avoidable death of mothers and babies, by reducing the suffering of fatal infectious diseases and by relaxing millions of people on poverty on the path of prosperity.

We are proud to have contributed to our partners to the incredible progress made over the past 25 years: maternal mortality has decreased by 40%, the access extended to the vaccine against HPV has prevented more than a million future cases of cervical cancer, and the progress of the contraceptives have given women better tools to help them decide if and when to become pregnant. We still have a long way to go, which is why I am happy that the foundation announces today that it engages $ 2.5 billion in women’s health innovation in the next five years.

This commitment is a good start. But it is also a drop in the bucket in relation to what is necessary. I think the rest of the bucket can and must be completed by partners in the private sector.

Indeed, women in high income countries have several of the same common health problems with women in low and intermediate income countries. There is a massive occasion of a unexploited market to invent and deliver the solutions that women need around the world. Biotechnology, consumer health and pharmaceutical companies should do more in women’s health. Beyond moral reasons, this is simply logical.

McKinsey & Company estimates that investment in endometriosis treatments, for example, has a market potential of $ 180 billion at $ 250 billion, comparable to the large ticket conditions like diabetes.

Or consider the many use cases for a portable ultrasound powered by the AI, which the Foundation has helped to develop for two thirds of women in low and intermediate income countries which do not have access to costly ultrasounds. It is a baguette that connects to a tablet running an algorithm formed with thousands of ultrasound images, and it can be used by workers who have not been trained in obstetrics. Research shows that this simple device can identify pregnancies at high risk early and even identify gestational age with more precision than humans.

This tool is very useful in distant Kenya, one of the areas where the ultrasound of AI has been tested. But it is just as useful in the North Dakota, where one in four women must drive for more than an hour to reach the nearest birth hospital. In 2022, approximately 2.3 million American women of prosecutor lived in “maternity deserts”, defined as counties without hospital, birth center, doctors and midwives with a delivery experience of babies.

Thanks to AI progress, this tool can be adapted for uses beyond obstetric care. Today, people go to specialized care or emergency rooms to be tested for conditions such as breast cancer and heart disease. With portable imaging devices, these projections could one day be done in local primary care establishments in high -income and low -income countries.

The list of opportunities lights up. Préclampsie is difficult to diagnose, as women can have the main symptoms of high blood pressure and proteinuria for many reasons. False positives lead to long and unnecessary hospitalizations, while false negatives can cause last minute jamming with fatal consequences. The test of the advanced SFIT-1pigf report eliminates uncertainty by measuring the levels of two proteins that play a role in the development of new blood vessels in the placenta. In 2024, the FDA approved the test of use in the United States, and the Gates Foundation supported studies to adapt it for use in low and intermediate income countries.

Last year, one of my colleagues at the Foundation was concerned about preeclampsia. She had monitored her blood pressure alone, but the results were not conclusive. She passed the SFIT-1PIFG test at 26 weeks, and it confirmed that she had preeclampsia and predicted how long she had left until she was to deliver. She was immediately hospitalized and intensely monitored. Six weeks later, she gave birth to a beautiful little girl whose name, Mihika, means “dew drops”.

This test can save the lives of women like my colleague, and she can also save the lives of women like the ones I cared in Karachi.

And the test is only the beginning. There is still no remedy for preeclampsia, and preeclampsia is only one of the many specific problems for women who require resolution. If we could fill the gap for nine major conditions, this would create 27 million years of healthy life per year, or about three additional days in good health each year for each woman on the planet.

This is the right thing to do. It is also an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs, innovators and investors. Women around the world have waited too long for better solutions. Together we can deliver.

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