“Women’s Health is having a moment. We’ve unleashed the genie, and there’s no putting it back,” stated Seema Kumar, CEO of Cure, during her opening remarks at “The Power of X” summit on March 24, 2025. This declaration set the tone for the first day of the two-day event focused on a critical question: How can the healthcare industry capitalize on the $1 trillion women’s health market opportunity that remains largely untapped?
Day one brought together entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, policymakers, and healthcare providers united by the recognition that women’s health extends far beyond reproductive care – and that this expanded definition opens significant investment opportunities.
Redefining the Market Opportunity
The outdated “bikini medicine” approach – focusing primarily on reproductive organs – has historically limited both innovation and investment in women’s health. Carolee Lee, Founder and CEO of Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM), presented a newly released report created in collaboration with KPMG that reframes this market.
“The health of women is not only reproductive health, but extends way beyond to include every disease and condition that disproportionately or differently impacts women,” Lee explained. She highlighted examples like autoimmune diseases, which affect 80% women, Alzheimer’s, where two-thirds of patients are women, and cardiovascular disease, which manifests differently in women’s bodies.
This expanded understanding reveals substantial market opportunities across multiple therapeutic areas. When investors were surveyed about where they wanted to direct women’s health investments, neurology topped the list, followed by oncology, metabolic diseases, and cardiovascular diseases – with traditional reproductive health not even making the top five.
Cardiovascular health emerged as a particularly compelling opportunity. Dr. Stacey Rosen, President-Elect of the American Heart Association, noted: “Women have been understudied and underserved with respect to a range of disease manifestations that occur in both sexes. Heart disease takes decades to develop, but we haven’t made the investment to understand it in women’s bodies.”
Breast cancer treatment offers both cautionary lessons and success stories. Dr. Elizabeth Comen, breast oncologist at NYU Langone Health, traced how treatment has evolved from radical, disfiguring surgeries to more targeted approaches. “Medicine and science does not happen in a vacuum,” she noted, describing the historical context in which women’s bodies were often considered less important in research and clinical care.
Building the Evidence Base
Historical exclusion of women from clinical trials has created fundamental knowledge gaps that persist today. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg explained that until the NIH Revitalization Act in the early 1990s, women were largely excluded from research under the rationale that female biology was “too complex” and would complicate findings.
From drug dosing to diagnostic criteria, much of medical practice remains based on research conducted primarily in male subjects. “We’ve learned that women have been drastically underserved,” Dr. Hamburg explained. “We need to be really looking across different programs and policies as we think about what is going to make the difference in advancing the health of women.”
Dr. Stacey Rosen identified multiple areas needing investment, including cardiovascular health, pregnancy-related complications, and brain health. She emphasized that pregnancy offers a critical window into women’s lifetime health risks while brain health remains significantly understudied despite women making up two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients.
The Investment Paradox
Throughout the day the striking disconnect between the women’s health market potential and current funding levels became very clear. As per data presented at the event, women’s health receives only 2% of venture capital funding in healthcare – just $823 million of last year’s $41.2 billion healthcare investments. If women make 85% of healthcare decisions and control 80% of consumer spending, why does women’s health remain severely underfunded?
Seema Kumar identified the “catch-22” perpetuating this gap: “Lack of baseline data means lack of innovation, misdiagnosis, under treatment, and that is where we are today,” she explained. “The solution is alternative sources of non-dilutive funding for expensive, high risk early stage research projects that will fill the data gap.”
The lack of such non-dilutive funding currently creates a cycle where lack of investment limits data collection, which further limits investment. Women’s health founders, who experience these challenges day in and day out, added their frontline perspectives and learnings on navigating this landscape to the conference. Priyanka Jain, co-founder and CEO of Evvy, emphasized the unique educational burden women’s health companies face when fundraising: “It is frustrating to have to explain these symptoms, how big of a problem it is again and again.” She noted that reframing women’s health innovations in terms of market opportunity rather than social impact has been crucial to her company’s fundraising success. “These are massive business opportunities – huge unmet needs with significant patient spend against them, and no solutions in the market.”
Stella Vnook, CEO of Likarda, offered evidence of the slowly shifting investor mindset: “Five years ago, I tried to build a company around ovarian cancer, and it just fell on deaf ears,” she shared. “Last year, I started the journey again talking about ovarian cancer, and found there’s a lot more receptivity to treating women’s health. So I think the market is really changing.”
Collaborative Solutions for Data and Funding
Several promising models for accelerating progress in women’s health research and investment emerged from the discussions.
Seema Kumar advocated for sharing existing datasets across organizations. “There is a lot of data out there on the health of women, but collecting and analyzing that data in a collaborative and non-competitive way could accelerate innovation,” she noted. Kumar suggested that artificial intelligence could help mine these datasets for new insights without requiring entirely new research programs.
The American Heart Association’s “Go Red for Women Fund” represents another model for targeted investment. “It was newly launched within the last year with $75 million to amplify the speed with which we bring solutions to market supporting comprehensive women’s health,” Dr. Rosen explained. She emphasized that investing in women’s health research creates benefits beyond women. “When you invest in research focused on women, it leads to advances in other fields as well. It’s a success story that benefits everyone.”
The Path Forward
As the first day of the conference concluded, discussions shifted from problem identification to implementation strategies. The consistent message was that the women’s health market represents not just an ethical imperative but a significant business opportunity – one that requires strategic investment, evidence generation, and collaborative approaches.
Seema Kumar challenged attendees to move from conversations into actions: “Because what we want to come out of this two-day meeting is actionable, specific recommendations that we can all together take forward and then ultimately cures for some of the biggest health challenges faced by women today.”
