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Advancing innovation in the women’s health space has long been an uphill battle. But a number of leaders in the biotech community have taken up the vanguard and are changing the game.
Their efforts were highlighted at the inaugural Health Executive and Research Summit in San Diego, where the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) hosted the panel, Capital to Commercial: The Women’s Health BIOtech Ecosystem.
“The mission of BIO’s Women’s Health Task Force is to ensure a robust pipeline of biopharmaceutical innovations for women’s health. As part of this mission, we are committed to elevating women’s health and that is what brings us together today,” said Michele Oshman, BIO’s Chief Patient Advocate, who also serves as the executive sponsor of BIO’s board-level task force.
Leaders in the women’s health innovation space understand that the risky nature of biotech investment, coupled with historic stigma around the topic of women’s health, require a collaborative and creative approach. The panel reflected that approach, bringing together leaders in women’s health from across the healthcare investment spectrum.
Going farther together
“We often talk about the cost that it takes to bring a product to market,” said Sabrina Martucci Johnson, President and CEO at Daré Bioscience, a BIO member company specializing in women’s health. “We’re talking tens of millions of dollars.”
Only six percent of private health care investment goes toward women’s health—though women make up half the population, says a January 2026 report from the Boston Consulting Group.
“Of these limited funds, 90% flow into just three areas: women’s cancers, reproductive health, and maternal health, leaving other high-burden, high-prevalence conditions that impact women uniquely, differently, or disproportionally, undercapitalized,” according to the report.
Community building is essential to mitigate this imbalance, LaToya Wilson, Managing Director, Global Co-Head of Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures told the panel.
“Our accelerator portfolio spans a wide array of companies, including those in enterprise software and healthcare, bringing together founders with different experiences—especially around challenges like fundraising,” Wilson explained. “That’s how you advance things—by sharing knowledge, bridging gaps, and helping to move forward in a collective effort.”
Johnson agreed. “We’ve really had to deploy a lot of creative public-private partnerships to advance our most interesting products and most first-in category—and therefore high-risk products—in the portfolio,” she said.
These partnerships include grants and collaboration with federal agencies or major private funders, but the search for creative solutions doesn’t stop there.
“We’ve also deployed strategic partnerships with pharma as well,” Johnson said. “For our first FDA-approved product, we partnered with Organon to bring that product to market and to commercialize it.”
It was this partnership with Organon that allowed her firm Daré to obtain advances based on future royalties that they could then reinject back into their pipeline to fund further innovation.
Organon, a diverse healthcare company with a focus on women, derives benefit from partnerships that drive innovative developments, said Vanessa Belozeroff, Head of R&D Portfolio and Project Management at Organon.
“That’s one of the reasons why, last year at Organon, we piloted our accelerator program,” she said. “We don’t offer the capital component of it, but we offer the brainchild component of it.”
Organizations applying for Organon’s accelerator are selected based upon capability and capacity matches within the organization.
“Organizations we work with might not necessarily have built out all of their capabilities, but they might want to access them,” said Belozeroff.
Organon is working to be a role model for how the industry connects and builds networks, “so that we can help each other out. So that we’re supporting the innovation to advance,” Belozeroff said.
Another exciting initiative that Daré shared during the panel was their efforts to democratize investment opportunities by enabling small investors to participate and invest in Daré’s portfolio, thereby allowing women to be owners of their own healthcare solutions.
“Typically, these are only available to super high net worth people or institutions,” she noted.
Having the conversation
As many in the field (and many women themselves) know, women’s health innovation can be a frustratingly taboo subject.
Johnson recalled being banned from a podcast for saying the word vagina too many times. Yet men’s reproductive health does not face the same squeamishness.
“If you’re developing something for the prostate, for example, you have to be able to describe it,” said Johnson. And everyone sitting at the table has to get over the giggles, as Oshman reminded, when using scientific terms to refer to women’s health.
“We’ve gotten very comfortable with breast cancer, saying breasts, but there was a time when we didn’t say breasts when we were talking about breast cancer,” Johnson remembered.
“Sometimes you need a therapeutic to remove the stigma,” she added. “We haven’t had a product for female sexual arousal disorder, for example. We haven’t had many vaginal drug delivery products, which is a fantastic way to deliver drugs to women. But we haven’t had the conversations and we all need to be having them.”
In many ways, these conversations could even be baked into the normal education for new investors in the biotech space.
When it comes to biotech investment—especially in areas where there is a greater need—investors are required to have a bit more patience due to unique hurdles to get to commercialization.
“There may not be revenue generation for a certain amount of time,” said Wilson. “So we have to educate the investment community on the opportunities in and around this type of investing.”
Unstoppable force
The panelists stressed a need for diversification of approaches, ideas, and initiatives to turn the tide on women’s health investment.
Johnson said a key challenge is showing it can be done.
“What is the definition of insanity,” she posited. “It’s doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome, right? We have to demonstrate the returns. We have to demonstrate that we can get products across the finish line, not just to an FDA approval, but to a commercial success.”
