Claire McDonald says private investment is critical to advance women’s health. | Photo courtesy of Claire McDonald
Formidable talked with Claire McDonald yesterday about the challenges in women’s health care funding. Today, we delve a little deeper.
Claire McDonald, PhD, began her career as a research scientist experimenting on mice. She studied how anti-inflammatory drugs impacted Alzheimer’s disease.
Much to her chagrin today, she didn’t include female mice in the study.
“That’s shocking, right?” says McDonald, senior program officer for health commercialization at Massachusetts-based VentureWell. She also manages Sprint for Women’s Health, a $113 million public-private partnership between the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health and VentureWell. “We know that Alzheimer’s affects more women than men (women account for about two-thirds of all cases) so we should be doing sex-aggregated research.”
The National Institutes of Health didn’t even mandate that funding must be disaggregated by sex until 10 years ago. That’s just one reason, McDonald notes, why women’s health has been underresearched and underfunded. Women’s health-oriented companies still receive just 2% of VC-related health care funding.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Is there still a widespread belief that women’s health is mainly about reproductive health? We're very much moving away from it. We need to stop thinking about it as only reproductive health of menopause. There's a lot of more diseases that either differently affect women, like cardiovascular disease, or they disproportionately affect women (like) autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases.
Is private investment the No. 1 thing that needs to happen to advance this research? I think so. There’s been a big jump in philanthropic or grant investment over these last few years. To really translate those innovations that can be used by a human being, private investment is needed.
How does philanthropic investment differ in its impact? One major difference is the innovator doesn’t have to pay back the money or give a stake in their company. It’s free money, but in my experience, it tends to be lower check sizes or amounts. When it comes to developing a therapeutic, you need $10 million to $20 million to get it to a place where it’s ready. That often only comes from the private sector.
How important is it to have women innovators involved in this space? It’s important as the kind of spokesperson, but it’s also important to make sure everyone is involved and advocating for this work. It’s mainly men in these investor circles holding the purse strings.
What resources do women need to get their idea and companies to market? At VentureWell, we have the Venture Development Framework. It’s like a pie, and each slice is a different element an innovator needs to be successful (team-building, regulatory, investment, technology). We run this needs assessment for all innovators who work with us.
Where do you think the market will be in five or 10 years? I think in the United States, probably the thing that will break through is maternal health. It’s been lagging, especially compared to other developed nations. Something I thought was interesting is that diagnostic tests in the women’s health space provide a two-times return on investment compared to diagnostic tests in other areas.
Where are big advances being made? Endometriosis. I think it affects 10% of women. It's a debilitatingly painful disease and it takes 10 years to diagnose it, which is shocking, and you need to undergo surgery to receive that diagnosis. There’s really a wide variety of different innovators developing blood tests or app-based tests. That's the thing that's going to break through in the short term.
How important is it to get women who have some of these conditions in front of the investment community? I think that would be an excellent way to go about it.
As someone who’s spent a career in women’s health, is the slow pace of progress frustrating to you? Yes. I’m getting older. I want some of these solutions ready for me to use. Since 2020, we’ve seen some very big investments from the philanthropic world. What I want to see more quickly is the private sector getting involved.
