💌 Issue 82: World-first IVF tech | Grand prize for tween period care company | Unfabled heads to Boots | carbon footprint tracking in new app
+ lots more in your weekly round-up of women's health innovation and FemTech news
Hi! Welcome to issue #82 of FutureFemHealth, here to bring you your weekly news about women’s health innovation and FemTech (w/c 16 December 2024).
It’s our last full issue of the year before we take a break until 2025. Thank you for reading and subscribing in 2024!
🌟 Coming up today we’ve got:
🌎 World-first as baby is born from eggs matured outside the body.
❤️ Tween period care company wins Pharrell Williams’ $1m Black Ambition grand prize.
💊 Unfabled launches own-brand supplement range in Boots.
✅ Asan launches period tracking app that also tracks your carbon footprint.
Got news to share from the world of FemTech and women’s health innovation? Let me know at anna@futurefemhealth.com
🌎 World-first for IVF tech ‘Fertilo’
The female-led biotech company Gameto has announced the world’s first live human birth using ‘Fertilo’ - its technology that matures eggs outside the body.
Traditional IVF can take an incredible emotional and physical toll on the person trying to get pregnant. It relies on nearly two weeks’ worth of injections to help stimulate hormones and mature eggs.
Instead, Fertilo replaces up to 80% of the hormone injections and reduces treatment cycles to just three days.
After egg retrieval, immature eggs are placed in a lab dish with Fertilo’s engineered ovarian support cells (OSCs) and ‘co-cultured’ which helps the eggs to mature.
Dr. Dina Radenkovic, CEO and co-founder of Gameto said:
“By overcoming the major challenges of conventional IVF, such as long treatment cycles, significant side effects, and the emotional and physical strain, Fertilo provides a potentially faster, safer, and more accessible solution for families.”
An IVF revolution?
The Gameto solution may hold promise for improved IVF outcomes. The start-up says that there is potential for higher rates of egg maturation and embryo formation, while also fewer complications.
Dr. Luis Guzmán, Lead at Pranor Labs & Science, who oversaw the Fertilo-enabled IVF cycle, said:
“The ability to mature eggs outside the body with minimal hormonal intervention significantly reduces risks such as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and alleviates the side effects caused by high hormone doses. Fertilo is a major advancement for women who cannot tolerate or do not want to undergo the burden of the traditional IVF protocol, bringing hope and new possibilities to a broader patient population.
“This breakthrough represents a historic milestone in reproductive medicine.“
So where to next?
This first delivery took place at a clinic in Lima, Peru, where Gameto has achieved regulatory clearance. The mother (unnamed for now), said that “with fewer injections and a gentler, less invasive egg retrieval process, [the Fertilo method] gave me hope and reassurance during a deeply personal journey.”
Gameto has also secured regulatory clearance in markets such as Australia (where the start-up recently announced a strategic partnership with IVFAustralia), Japan, Argentina, Paraguay and Mexico. In the US, Gameto is preparing for Phase 3 trials.
While pricing structure for the US market isn’t yet available, it’s hoped that the technology could help to make IVF more affordable and accessible - due to reduced medication costs, fewer clinic visits and potential fewer IVF attempts needed thanks to improved outcomes.
If you’ve followed innovation in IVF in 2024 you’ll know that much of the focus has been on integrating AI into the IVF decision-making process to improve outcomes. Gameto’s success, on the other hand, shows that progress in fertility isn’t limited to AI outcomes, but can come from reimagining the biological processes involved in IVF - and by putting the patient experience front and centre too.
Continue reading: FutureFemHealth
💰 Funding, deals and investment news
📌 US: Tween period care company wins Pharrell Williams’ $1m Black Ambition grand prize. RedDrop help young girls navigate their first periods and puberty. The company sells period care kits for tweens that include menstrual pads specially sized to fit the body. The grand prize is an equity investment for the RedDrop founders who say they have struggled to raise money from traditional investors. (Continue reading: Black Enterprise)
📌 UK: The Bettii Pod secures £400,000 in investment and Scottish Edge funding. The Bettii Pod is a washer for menstrual cups or discs that can be installed into toilet cubicles in offices, gyms, airport and other public spaces. By making it easier for women to use and reuse cups and discs, the start-up hopes to encourage more women to make the switch. Funding came from Equity Gap - a leading angel investment firm in Scotland - as well as a £70,000 Scottish Edge competition prize. (Continue reading: Scottish Business News)
🌟 Industry news from this week
📌 UK: Unfabled launches own-brand supplement range in Boots. Unfabled is building an incredibly successful flywheel here in the UK - originally founded as an online marketplace to bring together a fragmented landscape of women’s health products, the startup then announced it would develop its own supplement line - cleverly built using insights from its own consumer insights and research platform ‘Unfabled Labs.’ The ‘built for women, by women’ approach has now helped Unfabled nab a shelf in the UK’s leading health and beauty retailer Boots. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)
📌 US: Fertility start-up Lushi launches to transform the IVF experience. Lushi wants to make the IVF experience easier and more supportive. Launching this month, women can hire ‘injection specialists’ in five US cities to give them their fertility shots at home, use remote monitoring and access a 12-week ‘My Fertility Plan.’ Later in 2025, injection bars and fertility wellness pop-up spas are planned. (Continue reading: HIT consultant)
📌 UK: Asan launches period tracking app that also tracks your carbon footprint. The Asan app gives users an easy way to track in real time the carbon footprint of their period products. Founded by Ira Guha, the environmental trackers aims to drive behaviour change and speed up adoption of reusable options - like Asan’s range of cups and period underwear. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)
📌 US: FemPulse wins FDA investigational device exemption (IDE) to use overactive bladder vaginal ring in pivotal trial. FemPulse’s CEO Alexandra Haessler describes the FemPulse Ring as an “internal wearable” with a “set it and forget it” approach to help reduce symptoms of incontinence. It is designed as an alternative to medications which sometimes have limited efficacy and poor side-effects. The FemPulse multicentre randomised control trial will take place across 15 US locations. (Continue reading: Medical Device Network)
📌 US: WellTheory launches women’s health program to address link between autoimmune disease and hormonal imbalances. Of the more than 50 million Americans who suffer from an autoimmune disease, eighty percent are women, with certain conditions being 16 times more common. Hormonal imbalances play a significant role in the development and progression of autoimmune diseases - and WellTheory’s new program will focus on supporting women to navigate the interplay between the two. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)
📌 US: Kindbody CEO steps down (again). Founder Gina Bartasi had only returned to the CEO role of the fertility chain Kindbody in June 2024, after a two-year absence, with rumours of an IPO on the cards at that point. But now with Gina’s departure there are indications that instead Kindbody may be seeking to be acquired after it failed to secure new funding. (Continue reading: BNN Bloomberg)
📌 INDIA: How the FemTech space is evolving in India. Offline models, like fertility clinics, are poised for growth in India because they cater to a preference for in-person care. Online and virtual FemTech startups conversely, have struggled to scale, as even though they are convenient they fail to build the trust required for long-term success. (Continue reading: We Work)
🩸 Research and women’s health news
📌 US: NIH launches women’s health research website. After a recent NASEM report criticised the lack of investment in women’s health research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched ‘Discover WHR’ a centralized resource on NIH-funded research, scientific literature and open funding opportunities. It will initially focus on surfacing research about menopause, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and scleroderma. (Continue reading: MSN)
📌 GLOBAL: How big data can improve women’s health. In this article, author Anita Zaidi argues that the data revolution is thankfully now giving us better tools to begin to measure the complexity of women’s lives and ensure we aren’t designing or measuring outcomes in silos. Until now “a safe childbirth initiative and a financial literacy initiative compete for the same pot of resources, then take two discrete approaches to achieving the same goal: more women and girls who are healthy and empowered.” (Continue reading: Nature)
📄 Govt & policy news
📌 Women's pain 'dismissed' in UK, warns parliamentary report: The UK Government has less than two months to respond to a damning report from the Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) laying bare the poor state of women’s health in England. There are clear asks and recommendations to improve things including long-term, ring-fenced funding for the women’s health hub model and greater investment in research. FemTech also got a mention, with acknowledgement that the NHS needed to “get better” at producing its own digital information and to “start keeping pace” with existing women’s health apps in FemTech. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)
📌 US: White House hosts its first conference on women’s health research. The Bidens say they have galvanized nearly $1 billion in the last year to close the women’s health research gap. This conference spotlighted both federal efforts around women’s health, and also how those efforts could also catalyze greater private investment - which is desperately needed. (Continue reading: Biopharma Dive)
📆 Save the date
Well-Tech World Summit: London, February 3-4, 2025
Keen to learn more about the intersection of women’s health tech and wellness? Why not head to London’s Well-Tech World Summit to understand cutting edge wellness trends and meet fellow industry leaders. The stellar speaker line-up includes FemHealth Insights’ Dr Brittany Barreto. Tickets and info here.
✅ Jobs
📌 UK: Director of Brand, Flo Health
📌 UK/ REMOTE: Partnerships Manager, Bloody Good Employers
📌 REMOTE: Senior Marketing Manager, Origin
📌 US / REMOTE: Operations Intern, Fierce Foundry
📌 US: Executive Communications Coordinator, Allara
📌 US / REMOTE: VP, Deputy General Counsel, Maven
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
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