Issue 22: $1m for Mosie Baby | FDA clears Natural Cycles & Apple Watch pairing | Hot flushes predictor from Embr Labs
Issue 22: $1m for Mosie Baby | FDA clears Natural Cycles & Apple Watch pairing | Hot flushes predictor from Embr Labs
+ more in your weekly round-up of FemTech and women's health innovation
Hi! Welcome to issue #22 of FutureFemHealth, (w/c 18 September 2023). After a lovely weekend at a rooftop bar for a friend’s 40th birthday, I’m sat here in a jumper with a hot chocolate writing today’s newsletter!
🌟 Coming up today we’ve got:
💳 $1m for Mosie Baby - I delve into the story of its at-home insemination kit
📌 Natural Cycles new seamless integration with Apple Watch gets FDA clearance
🔥 Embr Labs is on course to predict hot flushes
❤️ The #JustAPeriod campaign from Wellbeing of Women
Got news to share from the world of FemTech and women’s health innovation? Let me know at anna@futurefemhealth.com
Headlines
🏆 $1m for Mosie Baby - as it launches updated at-home insemination kit and expands across the US
In 2015, Maureen and Marc Brown were a couple struggling to conceive a baby.
They began trying at-home artificial insemination but weren’t finding the process comfortable or successful.
As Maureen explains:
“It dawned on us that there must be special syringes made specifically for home insemination: something about the same size as a tampon, with a comfortable diameter and no harsh edges. We were shocked to find out nothing like that existed.”
So the duo created their own - a syringe for use at home with a (now patented) slit-style opening and a design that minimises waste lost during transfer and maximises the release of semen.
Over the last eight years, Maureen and Marc have successfully had their own child (their second child and the first ‘Mosie Baby’) and have helped more than 100,000 families inseminate in the privacy of their own home.
Now, Mosie Baby has just closed a new round of funding of $1million
Funding for this $1m ‘bridge round’ came from top investors including Magic Fund, The Fund Everywhere and female-led angel investing networks.
Mosie Baby now plans to improve accessibility for its products - expanding into more mass retailers this year in the US and through healthcare and employer benefit partnerships too.
Mosie Baby has also launched an updated at-home insemination kit.
In its newly-updated kit, Mosie Baby has this time focused on improving the semen collection part of the process.
As Urologist Dr Aaron Spitz explains:
“The default collection device for semen has been urine sample cups, which are poorly designed for a fluid that bears little resemblance to urine.”
To solve this problem, Mosie Baby now offers two new proprietary collection cups specifically designed for semen collection to work with its patented Mosie Syringes.
Why artificial insemination?
At-home insemination kits can be used as an alternative to, or a step before attempting clinical fertility treatments / IVF.
These sorts of kits are typically a fraction of the cost of IVF (hundreds vs thousands), help avoid lengthy waiting lists for treatment, and allow people to inseminate in the comfort of their own home.
Just last month, you might remember I wrote about Béa Fertility, a UK start-up launching another at-home kit (and backed by £2.5m of new investment led by Octopus Ventures).
Bea works differently to Mosie Baby since it works by inserting a cervical cap of semen at the cervix where it needs to be left for an hour before removing. Mosie Baby tell me that in the US, this cervical cap method isn’t as popular (The Stork OTC for example, stopped distributing a few years ago).
What I am excited about with Béa is the opportunity for accessibility and impact here in the UK - it’s being trialled in the NHS at the moment and is piloting its kits in London via one of the Government’s Women’s Health Hubs.
Opening up access and reducing costs
Ultimately, more choice for the 1 in 6 couples who face infertility (plus the many individuals too) is a good thing.
As an IVF mum myself of two children, we turned to IVF after unexplained infertility and had our first child via the NHS route and our second through private healthcare. But the idea of trying home insemination as a first step was never even discussed or something I was aware of potentially being an option.
Which begs the question of how many other families may not necessarily need to go down the IVF route but could consider artificial insemination at home as a more affordable, more accessible option or step on the journey to parenting.
Source: Mosie Baby
📌 Birth Control App Natural Cycles gets FDA clearance to integrate with Apple Watch
People who use the Natural Cycles app as birth control can now automatically sync their overnight wrist temperature into their Natural Cycles app.
It’s an easy alternative to taking a manual temperature with a basal thermometer - and arguably may improve app reliability if users don’t have to remember to take their temperature.
Natural Cycles is still the only app on the market that’s been cleared by the FDA to be used and marketed as birth control (although NHS guidance in the UK advises also finding a qualified fertility awareness teacher too).
And this new integration has been cleared by the FDA too, as well as regulators in Europe and it is registered in Australia.
Apple isn’t the first for this sort of integration though - last August FDA clearance was given for Natural Cycles integration with the Oura Ring.
(Source: The Verge)
🌟 More news from this week
📌 Can hot flushes be predicted and treated? Boston-based start-up Embr Labs has teamed up with the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a new non-pharmaceutical technology that uses biomarker data to predict hot flashes in menopausal women. A device worn on the wrist will anticipate and then offer cooling relief to resolve the hot flush. This is a step up from Embr’s current wearable which helps with cooling but only after a user presses a button on the wearable. (Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst)
📌 How digital is putting people in charge of their fertility. Start-ups Hertility, Fairtility and Embie App are profiled in this feature about the importance of data, diagnostics and transparency in the fertility space. (Source: Digital Health)
📌 Practical ideas to improve women’s health equity: FemTechnology Summit has co-produced a new report with Deloitte: ‘Urgency in addressing women’s health’, exploring how environmental, societal and corporate governance (ESG) frameworks might help us track progress in women’s health. Proposals include: updating medical education curriculum, ensuring fair distribution of research funding, and incentives to enforce diversity in clinical trials (Source: Deloitte and FemTechnology Summit report: Environmental, Social and Governance alignment on women’s health)
📌 FDA meets to consider artificial wombs. A two-day panel this week is discussing how best to evaluate safety and effectiveness as well as ethical quandaries in running clinical trials of artificial womb technology. Worth noting that this discussion is only focusing on the use of artificial wombs as alternative care for extremely premature infants, not womb transplants. (Source: Stat News)
📌 White space in dentistry and menopause? A new survey of 1,000 perimenopausal women found 70% experienced at least one oral health symptom including dry mouth, receding gum lines and increased tooth decay. Which leads me to conclude that this leaves a big white space for products to address these unmet health issues - do you know of anyone looking into this? Let me know! (Source: Delta Dental)
🌟 Latest resource
📌 Want to build your fundable brand - free FemTech course alert! If you’re an early stage start-up, this 30-day course from branding expert Kung Pik Liu will help you create your investor-ready brand (even if you have no design or marketing experience) in just 1 hour a day. Find out more and apply here now.
🩸 Research and women’s health news
📌 Over half of women who had traumatic childbirth say ordeal ‘put them off more kids’. The Mumsnet poll also found seven in ten still had problems a year later. Kim Thomas, chief executive of the Birth Trauma Association says what’s needed is: “honest, evidence-based antenatal education; compassionate and professional care during labour; and postnatal care that is designed to identify and treat every birth injury or mental health problem.” (Source: The Independent)
✅ Campaign of the week - #JustAPeriod
#JustAPeriod is the new campaign from UK charity Wellbeing of Women. It’s been launched to make sure noone is held back in life because of their period - by sharing information, resources and real-life stories about periods and gynaecological conditions,
I’m seeing this as part of a growing wave of education and awareness in the UK right now where generations of women (me included!) are unlearning what we were taught to ignore or put up with as we grew up with and now we are relearning what we need to know about our own bodies.
(Source: Wellbeing of Women)
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading!
See you next time,
Anna