JPM Women’s Breakfast promotes gender diversity in trials, offers financing tips

Kicking off the panel’s conversation over unique challenges associated with funding and innovation in women’s health was Freya Biosciences CEO and co-founder Colleen Acosta, whose clinical-stage company is taking an innovative approach to women’s health, with microbial immunotherapies to regulate the immune system and inflammatory responses implicated in a number of indications including infertility and preterm birth. Acosta emphasized the need for research and robust data to demonstrate proof-of-concept and thus build a case for fundraising.

Echoing the importance of leveraging quality data to illustrate the importance of the problems being solved in women’s health companies today, Iron Health co-founder Stephanie Winans discussed her experience fundraising in women's health as a female founder. Winans highlighted that it is key to know your audience when fundraising. “The onus is on you to tell your story in a way that resonates. Often you are pitching to people who do not share the same basis of understanding on the problem or the market. It is your job to quantify the market and the opportunity, and to consider that an emotional story may not be relatable for all audiences.”

Organon Head of innovation ecosystem integration Diana Torgersen, whose focus on innovation in women’s health, incorporated lessons from her experience as a venture investor at Novo Holdings. She observed that pharmaceutical and biotech companies are critical in evolving innovation in women’s health, as the innovation cycle starts with clinical research¬.

Acosta added that women’s health issues are similar to other emerging arenas in the lack of general scientific understanding about those issues, urging women’s health advocates to push the ball forward to expand investment and awareness. Part of this awareness includes understanding that women’s health is much broader than diseases and conditions specific to women, encompassing both health issues unique to women and those conditions that affect both men and women but affect women differently or disproportionately. The panel emphasized the importance of signing women up for clinical trials, to ensure that treatments being studied will be equally safe and effective for women as for men. Torgersen cited recent FDA draft guidance that aims to help clinical trial sponsors add diversity of sex to the patient pool. She also offered examples of clinical study planning where sponsors failed to consider the need for adding women to the patient population, leading them to study the wrong patient population. “It’s about positioning your trial to win,” Acosta agreed.

Continuing beyond clinical trial inclusion and thinking downstream to care delivery, Winans outlined the need for sex-specific medicine, providing care for women that considers how disease and treatment affect women differently, and providing care for conditions that only affect women, including PCOS, endometriosis, and menopause. Acosta called this “low hanging fruit” for investors, because there is a broad understanding of the biology behind these medical issues, even though the clinical data is not there yet. The low hanging fruit has not been recognized, and there are many missed opportunities, partially due to lack of diverse teams, which are able to spot the biased medical product development. Data has shown many times that diverse teams lead to better and innovative decision, ultimately leading to better profitability, Torgersen noted.

The panelists concluded with encouraging messages for women’s health leaders and female business leaders. “Don’t give up,” Winans urged, observing a sea change toward recognizing the need for a greater focus on women’s health. Winans also called for women’s health conversations to become more gender-inclusive.

Torgersen said she sees this as the right time to accelerate women’s health innovation efforts, pointing out that only three years ago, women’s health conversations were not taking place at the JP Morgan health care conference; but now, “there’s an entire track for pursuing investment at the conference” in this space.

The recognition that women’s health is white space with large patient populations has increasingly been recognized by VCs, Torgersen observed. From the public payer side, Acosta observed increasing international interest in women’s health research as well, especially from European governmental bodies.

Asked about how to interact with payers as health care expenditures increase, Winans urged emerging companies to think about reimbursement in a fee-for-service environment even as we continue down the value-based care path. “Payer reimbursement is typically less for gender-specific women’s care,” and so “there’s a lot of work to do” in leveling reimbursement and upending those disparities.

The annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference (JPM) provides a unique opportunity to make connections among life sciences and health care emerging companies, pharmaceutical & biotechnology firms, digital health companies, med tech sponsors, investors, and advisors. The article above is part of Hogan Lovells’ JPM 2025 “Fireside Chat” series of presentations, through which our team of attorneys spoke with stakeholders at the conference about the most critical global health care issues emerging today.