Relating to improvements in healthcare, Maneesha Ghiya means enterprise.
As a enterprise capitalist and investor at hedge funds, the Harvard Enterprise grad has spent greater than 25 years — just about her complete profession — investing in healthcare.
However when a medical emergency nearly took her life, Ghiya noticed firsthand the necessity for innovation in girls’s healthcare particularly. So, she began her personal enterprise capital agency, FemTech Ventures, to fill that hole.
FemTech Ventures companions with companies to advance girls’s well being by means of drugs, units, digital and synthetic intelligence, and diagnostics (imaging, checks and instruments).
The agency’s funding strategy appears to be like at girls’s well being situations in 3 ways: “Solely girls” (endometriosis), “largely girls” (breast most cancers) and “in another way in girls” (coronary heart illness).
“We created and printed this framework in 2019, and it has since been adopted by many others throughout the healthcare trade. By defining girls’s well being extra broadly, we’re capable of determine and convey ahead improvements that deal with situations throughout girls’s well being,” Ghiya stated.
We requested Ghiya for her ideas on the technology-based options which are making waves in girls’s well being, and the way her personal well being scare impressed her ardour for change.
Our interview follows, edited for readability and size.
HealthyWomen: Inform us about your expertise with postpartum hemorrhage and the way it led to the launch of FemTech Ventures?
Maneesha Ghiya: After I gave beginning to my daughter at Columbia College beneath the care of a prime OB-GYN, I encountered severe issues.
What started as an emergency C-section was a disaster with an undetected inner bleed. 4 surgeons carried out a reoperation that was in the end unsuccessful in finding the supply, and I used to be transferred to the ICU, the place I underwent 10 transfusions of blood and platelets.
Happily, my physique caught up with the bleed, and I survived. However that ordeal fueled a need for me to make a distinction in girls’s well being, which led me to discovered FemHealth Ventures.
Learn: Postpartum Hemorrhage Is a Lethal Drawback >>
HW: Traditionally, we all know that ladies’s well being has been ignored and underfunded. How is femtech serving to to broaden curiosity in girls’s well being?
Ghiya: We put money into medicine, units, diagnostics, and digital and synthetic intelligence within the girls’s well being area. We contemplate femtech a subset of girls’s well being and would see any software program or AI platforms tailor-made in the direction of girls’s well being falling into our digital and AI funding focus.
For instance, we invested in an organization known as Cercle. Cercle AI’s product analyzes affected person information inside a fertility clinic, permitting docs to rapidly entry knowledge on how comparable circumstances had been handled, together with protocols, success charges and uncomfortable side effects.
This helps optimize remedy plans, resulting in increased success charges — which, for these accustomed to the IVF journey, is extremely impactful.
Learn: Infertility Isn’t Only a Bodily Journey — It’s an Emotional One, Too >>
HW: What are you discovering most fun on the earth of femtech proper now?
Ghiya: I’m excited to see how AI and robotics can increase the usual of care throughout medical facilities.
One thrilling utility we see within the robotics and AI class is for needle-based procedures. As an illustration, contemplate epidurals throughout labor — 1 in 10 both fail or want adjustment as a result of every particular person has a distinct anatomy, which makes it difficult even for specialists to realize exact needle placement.
Considered one of our portfolio firms, Mendaera, has created a robotic needle-guidance machine that mixes ultrasound imaging with robotic supply.
Past epidurals, this know-how could be utilized to procedures like nerve blocks and breast biopsies. It is a recreation changer as a result of, beforehand, solely extremely expert clinicians may carry out all these procedures with effectivity and accuracy. With this robotic and AI steerage system, extra clinicians can ship needle-based care extra exactly, which is very impactful for sufferers who could not have entry to main medical facilities.
HW: Since launching FemHealth Ventures, inform us a couple of product/innovation that has been notably memorable for you.
Ghiya: We had been very excited when our portfolio firm Gynesonics was acquired in January by Hologic. At the moment, greater than 200,000 girls within the U.S. endure hysterectomies every year as a result of extreme and sometimes debilitating signs of fibroids.
Gyenosonics provides a brand new answer: a non-surgical, outpatient process utilizing radiofrequency ablation. The process is incision-free, permitting girls to return to work as quickly as the following day — in comparison with the months-long restoration related to surgical procedure. Due to Gynesonics, a whole bunch of hundreds of girls will keep away from hysterectomies. It was thrilling to see this superb innovation be delivered to extra girls by means of this acquisition.
HW: What huge developments are you hoping to see in girls’s healthcare within the close to future, or what ought to we now have on our radar?
Ghiya: I’m excited to see extra options for ladies within the postpartum melancholy (PPD) area. Sadly, maternal mortality charges within the U.S. have been on the rise lately, with PPD being a major contributor. In response to this pressing want, we invested in Reunion Neurosciences, which is creating a breakthrough drug remedy to deal with PPD.
It includes a one-time, four-hour remedy administered in a specialised facility by educated medical professionals [and has shown promising results in clinical trials]. The drug remedy is presently present process a full FDA trial and approval course of and can solely be out there beneath medical supervision.
Learn: When Postpartum Melancholy Hit, I Heard Solely the Lies My Melancholy Informed Me >>
HW: What’s your recommendation for a way readers may help help improvements in femtech?
Ghiya: We encourage anybody considering supporting girls’s well being to remain knowledgeable.
My firm commonly posts articles on our LinkedIn about key updates within the girls’s well being area and updates from our girls’s well being centered portfolio firms. An awesome instance of a latest replace within the girls’s well being area is the Gates Basis pledging $2.5 billion to girls’s well being initiatives. We’re thrilled to see the rising focus and momentum within the girls’s well being area.
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