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EVERYTHING
Making the Women’s Health Market
What: Founded by Jessica Federer, The Women’s Health Fund is moving beyond piecemeal investing and building a fund of funds specifically for women’s health. Rather than looking at single startups, the fund has partnered with established life science fund managers and anticipates having $60 billion under management to channel more venture capital into women’s health research and innovation.
Key Line: “’Because women were largely excluded from research until the 1990s, we owe women decades of science,’ says Jessica Federer, Founder and Managing Partner at The Women’s Health Fund. ‘We are just beginning to understand how sex-based differences impact organ systems, unlocking an incredible opportunity for the development and commercialization of new treatments, diagnostics, and cures.’”
My Take: I’m not a finance expert, but this seems to have the makings of a market, not just another drop in the bucket.
Source: The Women’s Health Fund
Judge Blocks Trump Plan to Tie Teen Pregnancy Funds to Political Ideology
What: A federal judge halted the Trump administration’s attempt to impose political rules on grants meant to prevent teen pregnancy, calling them “fatally vague” and politically driven. The blocked rules would have penalized groups discussing LGBTQ issues or diversity. Still, the recent confirmation of a Trump nominee with anti-trans views at HHS could make future funding tougher for these organizations.
Key Line: “Basically, this was the Trump administration threatening to withhold funds meant to deter teen pregnancy unless the organizations receiving them adhered to the president’s bigoted ideological dictates seeking to bar discussions on LGBTQ people and the concept of diversity.”
My Take: These gag rules are just one piece of the puzzle in how the Trump administration is trying to shut down *any* federal government funding of reproductive health.
Source: MSNBC
FERTILITY
Research on Air Pollution’s Link to Infertility Halted After Funding Cut
What: The New York Times interviews Shruthi Mahalingaiah, a Harvard physician-scientist who had her $3 million grant to study how air pollution affects women’s fertility canceled by the Trump administration. (It has since been reinstated by the courts, but the funding is still frozen.) Her work focused on environmental exposures and reproductive health; an area she says few researchers were addressing.
Key Line: “With this grant, I also wanted to understand which time window of exposure is most important for menstrual health — prenatal, childhood or adult. Our early results showed that the first trimester of pregnancy is a time to be especially concerned about air pollution and temperature.”
My Take: It’s important to chronicle all the science that’s been canceled in the past ten months. And at the same time it feels nearly impossible to quantify what could have come from that work.
Source: New York Times
More States Expand Fertility Coverage for Cancer Survivors
What: Twenty‑one states and D.C. now require insurance to cover fertility preservation for patients whose medical treatments could harm fertility, while two more states are debating similar laws. Coverage ranges from egg and sperm freezing to newer methods like ovarian tissue freezing, though “experimental” options are often excluded. The changes reflect rising demand as younger cancer survivors plan parenthood later and medical societies update fertility preservation guidelines.
Key Line: “The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has expanded its fertility preservation guidelines, and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) is expected to update its guidelines soon, which could push more insurers to cover these services.”
My Take: Fertility benefits have been one of the fastest-growing areas of employer health coverage over the past decade. And it was in part driven by people speaking openly about the challenges of getting pregnant. Perhaps that’s some hope for other women’s health challenges, too.
Source: Axios
MENOPAUSE
Probing How Menopause Changes the Brain
What: Fordham biology professor Marija Kundakovic is leading an NIH-funded study on how menopause affects the human brain at the cellular and molecular levels. Her team developed a way to identify menopause stages in postmortem brain tissue from 42 people, unlocking new potential for understanding links between hormone shifts and mental health risks like depression and anxiety. The new research will target molecular changes in the hippocampus that could lead to more effective, safer treatments than current hormone replacement options.
Key Line: “Her goal is to pin down the molecular-level changes that boost psychiatric risk for women as well as anyone else with ovaries, making possible new treatments that are more precise and effective than current methods. These treatments could provide an alternative to one current option, hormone replacement therapy, which women often balk at because of the potential health risks, Kundakovic said.”
My Take: It’s starting to feel like every major women’s-health discovery comes with the same footnote: imagine what we’d know if we’d started sooner.
Source: Fordham News
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