In today’s increasingly constrained research funding environment, private investment is no longer optional when it comes to women’s health—it’s essential. That’s why the announcement from Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures and Wellcome Leap CEO Dr. Regina Dugan is so catalytic.
Together, they are committing $100 million to transform women’s health research—not through incremental change, but through an innovation model built to deliver breakthroughs in years, not decades.
Wellcome Leap, led by Dugan, a former and the first female DARPA director, is applying the same moonshot model that gave us the internet, GPS, and mRNA vaccines. For the first time, that model is being scaled in women’s health—targeting diseases that disproportionately impact women and where the need is greatest, from cardiovascular disease to autoimmune disorders to mental health. Combined with Gates’ philanthropic leadership, this partnership pushes Wellcome Leap’s total commitment to $250 million on the way to a $1 billion goal. In doing so, Melinda French Gates is setting a new bar for other philanthropists to follow—showing what’s possible when bold vision and catalytic capital align.
This builds on the Wellcome Leap CARE Award—a $50 million, 3-year program to address the connection between menopause and Alzheimer’s disease. Launched under the leadership of Program Director Dr. Lisa Mosconi of Weill Cornell Medicine / NY-Presbyterian and WHAM Research Collaborative member, it aims to halve the lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s among women worldwide by 2050, potentially preventing 54.5 million cases globally.
The stakes are enormous. According to The WHAM Report, “The Business Case for Accelerating Women’s Health Investment”, an investment of just $350 million in women’s health research across a handful of conditions could yield $14 billion in economic returns. And the McKinsey Health Institute estimates that closing the health outcome gap for women could add over $1 trillion to global GDP annually by 2040.
Yet the stark reality is that despite making up over half of the U.S. population, women remain underrepresented in medical research. Just 7% of the NIH’s 2019 rheumatoid arthritis budget went towards women-focused research, even though 80% of people living with autoimmune disease are women. Only 4.5% of the 2019 NIH coronary artery disease budget focused on women—despite women being 50% more likely to die after a heart attack. And although two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women, there are no currently marketed treatments that offer sex-differentiated data or tailored detection services. In total, NIH earmarked $3.4 billion for women’s health in 2023—just 8% of its total $43.7 billion budget.
This isn’t just a knowledge gap—it’s a missed opportunity. One with significant human and financial costs. Obtaining sufficient funding is a long and difficult journey—especially for early-stage projects. But they cannot do it alone. Grants often require preliminary data that researchers haven’t yet had the opportunity to collect. As a result, promising ideas are left unexplored, and progress is delayed or lost. Without public and private funding and support, their work will only go so far.
Women’s health cannot continue to live on the edge—chronically underfunded and at risk of being sidelined when budgets tighten or political priorities shift. The temporary reversal of a Trump Administration decision to terminate funding for the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) earlier this year served as a wake-up call. If we are not vigilant—if we do not mobilize —we may once again find ourselves fighting to preserve research that impacts more than half the population. That close call made one thing clear: women’s health is still treated as a niche market, when it is central to our healthcare system—and to the strength of our economy.
Yet, the funding across the board tells a different story. WHAM’s Report found that only 2% of healthcare venture funding is currently allocated to women’s health—even as women make up 51% of the population, 50% of the workforce, 80% of healthcare decisions and 85% of consumer spending. Still, momentum is building. In 2024 alone, women’s health VC funding soared to $2.6 billion—a 55% increase from 2023—and now represents 4.5% of the total healthcare VC market, up from just 1.5% in 2020.
At WHAM, we are working to accelerate that trend: WHAM now convenes over 100 researchers and clinicians globally in its Research Collaborative, its Innovator’s Circle unites over 20 early-stage women’s health focused funds and a first-of-its-kind Investment Collaborative of multi-billion-dollar firms to guide capital from lab to market.
But momentum isn’t enough. To truly change the trajectory, we must remove the high bar women’s health projects must meet to access sources of funding. It’s time to empower and challenge the next generation to pursue bold ideas-—with 3Not30 timelines-—that have the potential to drive discovery, treatments, and outcomes that can improve lives for all of us.
Melinda French Gates and Regina Dugan have raised the bar. The challenge now is for others to follow.
Carolee Lee
Carolee Lee is Founder and CEO of Women's Health Access Matters (WHAM) and recognized by TIME as 100 Most Influential Leaders in Global Health.
