Earlier this year, a biotech company developing a treatment for a disease in which 90% of patients are women extended its Series A to an extraordinary $426.3 million.
To put that into context, it’s almost as much as the entire $456.2m we tracked at FutureFemHealth in women’s health funding in Q3.
Yet you probably didn’t read about it in the women’s health press. Including here at FutureFemHealth.
The company is Beeline Medicines, which is developing precision therapies for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Its lead programme, afimetoran, is being developed for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), better known as lupus.
There’s a good reason Beeline hasn’t featured prominently in women’s health coverage. It isn’t a women’s health company. Its pipeline spans several autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, not just lupus, and its treatments aren’t being developed specifically for women.
But that doesn’t make its work any less relevant to women’s health. Its lead programme targets a disease that overwhelmingly affects women, and the scale of its financing suggests substantial investor appetite for developing new treatments in this area.
And Beeline isn’t alone.
Sling Therapeutics has recently raised $123 million to advance a potential treatment for thyroid eye disease, which predominantly affects women, through Phase III. Japan’s SiccaNova raised around $8 million for a potential treatment for Sjögren’s syndrome, where more than 90% of patients are women, with women’s health investor MPower Partners among its backers.
And in March, Prolium Bioscience raised $50 million in a Series A to develop a new treatment for severe autoimmune disease, initially targeting systemic sclerosis, another condition that disproportionately affects women.
These financings show growing investment in new approaches to treating autoimmune disease. And given the disproportionate impact of these conditions on women, I think they deserve more attention from the women’s health industry.
But there’s another reason I’ve been looking more closely at autoimmune.
As new treatments advance, they could create demand for better diagnostics, patient selection, monitoring and ongoing care. These are areas where investment has historically been much more limited.
Women account for an estimated 63% to 80% of people diagnosed with autoimmune diseases, depending on the source and definition, with an even greater imbalance in conditions including lupus and Sjögren’s.
So this week, I’ve been speaking to founders and investors working across autoimmune to understand what’s changing, where the commercial opportunities might be and what this could mean for women’s health.
Here are five things that stood out….