NORDICwomen’s healthFUNDER COLLABORATIVE

For decades, medical research has disproportionately focused on male biology, with findings assumed to apply equally to women. Science is now finally challenging these long-held assumptions, revealing that differences between male and female biology go far beyond hormones - they extend to the genetic and cellular level.

At the same time, conditions that affect women exclusively (such as endometriosis and menopause) or disproportionately (such as Alzheimer’s and autoimmune diseases) have long been under-researched and underfunded relative to their disease burden, shaped by longstanding assumptions about what matters in health and medicine.

It's important to remember that these gaps have consequences far beyond research and scientific breakthroughs - they shape how diseases are diagnosed, treated and prioritised, and limit the development and investability of new solutions.

More research is desperately needed. So is investment in data infrastructure and long-term cohort initiatives that generate the biological and clinical data needed to understand female health on its own terms.

The fact that women make up 51% of the global population, while women's health receives just 6% of private healthcare investment (with 90% of that funding concentrated in women's cancers, reproductive and maternal health), represents a significant market opportunity.

And McKinsey has estimated that closing the women's health gap could add $1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040, through improved health, greater workforce participation and increased productivity.

Yet we know from history that significant unmet needs and economic potential do not automatically translate into an investable market. Sometimes we need to deliberately build the evidence, infrastructure and conditions that allow innovation to thrive and capital to value the opportunity.

In many conditions affecting women, the lack of validated biomarkers, reliable clinical endpoints and sufficient biological data makes developing and testing new treatments more costly, risky and uncertain. For example, endometriosis trials often rely on patient-reported pain scores, while ovarian ageing research lacks validated surrogate markers of egg quality. For commercial investors, this uncertainty can make even promising opportunities difficult to justify.

The result is a vicious cycle: without sufficient evidence, investment is harder to attract - and without investment, the evidence needed to advance new solutions remains out of reach.

Breaking this cycle requires philanthropic, public and commercial capital to work together, with philanthropy playing a unique role in funding the research, data and infrastructure that lay the foundations for future innovation.

All Nordic governments have recently allocated additional funding to women's health research, but turning this momentum into real, lasting progress will require more resources and long-term commitments that extend beyond political cycles. Philanthropy has an opportunity to help make that happen.

And the potential goes far beyond funding research. By supporting the development of data and infrastructure and helping bridge the gap between research and early commercialisation, philanthropic and catalytic capital can reduce risks further along the innovation journey - making it easier for commercial capital to follow and unlocking investments that might otherwise never happen.

Building the missing evidence base

Much of the foundational work needed - from longitudinal cohorts and shared datasets to validated biomarkers and common standards - benefits the entire ecosystem, but offers limited opportunities for any single commercial actor to capture the value.

Philanthropic capital can fund both additional research and these shared resources, enabling research and innovation to build on one another.

Turning unmet needs into investable opportunities

Because of the lack of data, innovators in women's health are often expected to build the scientific evidence base alongside their companies. This increases costs, extends development timelines and makes early investment particularly challenging.

Catalytic capital can help bridge this gap - supporting early validation, clinical evidence generation and the translation of research into solutions that can attract commercial investment.