Frontier Technologies in Women’s Health

By Dr. Tara Bishop, Founder and Managing Director, Black Opal Ventures

In the past few years, women’s health has been in the spotlight. Last year McKinsey published a groundbreaking study on women’s health funding and research on health gaps and the opportunity to address these gaps. Deloitte published several related articles on women’s health, looking specifically at things like the trust gap and growing investment interest. And in 2023, the White House announced its Initiative on Women’s Health Research. Recently, I spoke at the DHNY Summit, Springboard Enterprises Women’s Health Accelerator Showcase, and the Pathstone Impact Summit on this topic and attended the third Women’s Health Summit at the New York Stock Exchange this spring.  

After years of being underrepresented in clinical trials, underfunded for research, and living more days in poor health, the world now seems to recognize that we need more funding and more resources for women’s health. We now know that the women’s health gap not only affects millions of lives but also represents an estimated $1 trillion annual economic opportunity by 2040. According to McKinsey, only 4% of healthcare-related R&D is targeted specifically at women’s health issues, and sex-disaggregated data is available for just half of the interventions studied, leading to underestimation of disease severity and missed opportunities for innovation.  

On a positive note, we now see innovation in women’s health over the last decade as venture dollars flow to solutions that focus on the ways in which women interact with our healthcare system. From menopause-focused care to maternity and post-partum support, these companies are in stark contrast to the care that has long dominated women’s health. I often say that the resources today are leaps ahead of my experience having a child 20 years ago when all I had minimal prenatal and postpartum support outside of my obstetrician’s office.  

As we look to the future of Women’s Health, I’m most excited about the role that frontier technologies and how they are truly transforming the sector.  From innovation in robotics to artificial intelligence, these technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to improve women’s health.  

At Black Opal Ventures, we invest in companies applying frontier technologies to healthcare and life sciences with the belief that these companies will lead to outsized impact and industry transformative changes.  

Our portfolio includes many companies that are bringing together frontier technologies and women’s health.  For example, Conceivable Life Sciences built the world’s first AI-powered automated IVF lab that performs more than 200 steps required to combine egg and sperm to create an embryo. Just this year, Conceivable announced the world’s first baby born by remote intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).  

Other companies provide care for a broad spectrum of conditions and have a heavy focus on women’s health. Oath Surgical is deploying AI and robotics in ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) to improve patient experience, outcomes and value. Oath offers a value-based women’s health program to improve the outcomes and value for gynecological procedures. Flyte Health delivers best-in-class obesity medicine with personalization of care for women who have differing biological, behavioral, and lifestyle needs. 

As we consider treatments and therapeutics, we are excited about the technologies at companies like Outpace Bio and Closed Loop Medicine. Outpace Bio has built an AI platform for protein design for the development of novel therapeutics.  Their pipeline of engineered T cell therapies includes initial indications for ovarian and fallopian tube cancers – two cancers that only impact women, have high mortality rates and limited treatment options. Closed Loop Medicine is addressing the very important issue of medication dosing which is a particular problem for women who have different bioavailability and metabolism than men yet are often dosed the same way. Their recent patent for personalized GLP1 dosing exemplifies the potential to address the one-size-fits-all issue of medication prescribing.   

As we look to the future, I cannot be more excited about the prospect of frontier technologies impacting women’s health.  We are just touching the surface of understanding conditions that are specific to women (like pregnancy and menopause), more prevalent in women (like Alzheimer's disease and autoimmune disease), and different in women (like obesity). With bold innovation, sustained investment, and a deeper scientific awakening, we have the potential to rewrite the future of health for women—unlocking breakthroughs that will ripple across generations.