When I was the boss of Pediatrics at the AGA Khan University Hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, I spent a lot of time to take care of the babies of new mothers with preeclampsia. Too often the babies were born too early and too small – and I couldn’t save them.
The most difficult thing to be a pediatrician is to tell the parents that their precious baby has not survived. The second highest is not to explain why.
Preeklampsia is an important cause of death for mothers and newborns in places such as Karachi and in Seattle, where I now live, but we don’t know what it causes and There is no healing.
The main reason for this fatal gap in our knowledge is neglected. After a 2021 analysis led by McKinsey & Company, only 1% of research and innovation in healthcare are invested in female conditions outside of oncology. And for diseases that affect women and men, women in clinical studies are very underrepresented. Therefore, we hardly scratched the surface of understanding how women experience common illnesses such as heart cycle.
As a result, there is a long list of serious and ubiquitous conditions without good solutions, including autoimmune diseases, strong menstrual bleeding and endometriosis. Endometriosis causes severe pelvic pain and affects one of ten women worldwide, but it is misunderstood that 65% of women are initially diagnosed incorrectly.
That is why women, although they live longer than men, spend more time in poor health – no matter where they live in the world.
Finding answers to many years of questions about women is a great driver of our gender equality at the Gates Foundation. This is also of fundamental importance to achieve our 20-year goals, to end avoidable deaths of mothers and babies, reduce the suffering of fatal infectious diseases and to raise millions out of poverty on a way to prosperity.
We are proud to have contributed to the incredible progress with our partners that have been achieved in the past 25 years: Mothers mortality has decreased by 40%, the extended access to the HPV vaccine has prevented future cases of cervical cancer, and the progress in contraceptives have made better tools available to decide whether and when they are supposed to be pregnant. We still have a long way to go, which is why I would like to be happy that the foundation is celebrating 2.5 billion US dollars for the health innovation of women today.
This obligation is a good start. But it is also a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed. I think the rest of the bucket can and should be filled by partners of the private sector.
This is because women in countries with high incomes have many of the same health problems with women in countries with low and medium -sized incomes. There is a massive unused market chance to invent and deliver solutions that women need everywhere. Biotech, consumer health and pharmaceutical companies should do more in the health of women. Beyond the moral reasons, it simply makes a good business sense.
McKinsey & Company estimates that, for example, investing in treatments for endometriosis has a market potential of $ 180 to $ 250 billion, comparable to the market for big ticket conditions such as diabetes.
Or take into account the many applications for a portable AI-driven ultrasound that the foundation has developed for the two thirds of women in countries with low and medium-sized incomes that have no access to expensive ultrasound machines. It is a magic wand that has remained in a tablet that has expanded an algorithm with thousands of ultrasound images, and it can be used by workers who have not been trained in obstetrics. Studies show that this simple device can identify early pregnancies with high risk and can even identify the gestational age with more accuracy than humans.
This tool is very useful in Fernkenia, one of the areas in which the AI ultrasound was tested. But it is just as useful in North Dakota, where one of four women has to drive over an hour to reach the next birth hospital. In 2022, about 2.3 million US women lived in childbearing age “Maternity“Defined as counties without a hospital, obstetrics and doctors and nurse midwives with experience that give babies.
Thanks to the progress in the AI, this tool for usage purposes can be adapted beyond obstetrical care. Today people travel in special care or emergency rooms to show diseases such as breast cancer and heart disease. With portable imaging devices, these demonstrations could one day be carried out in the local basic supply in countries with high and low incomes.
The list of possibilities continues. Preeklampsia is difficult to diagnose, since women can have the main symptoms of high blood pressure and proteinuria for many reasons. False alarms lead to long, unnecessary hospital stays, while false negatives can lead to a last-minute scramble with fatal consequences. The state -of -the -art SFIT-1PIGF-Ratio test Removes uncertainty by measuring the mirrors of two proteins that play a role in developing new blood vessels in the placenta. In 2024, the FDA approved the test in the USA, and the Gates Foundation supports studies to adapt it for use in countries with low and medium -sized incomes.
Last year, a colleague of mine was worried about the foundation that she could possibly have preeclampsia. She had monitored her blood pressure alone, but the results were not conclusive. She completed the SFIT 1PIFG test after 26 weeks, and it confirmed that she had preeclampsia and predicted how much time she had until she had to deliver. She was immediately admitted to the hospital and intensively monitored. Six weeks later, she brought a beautiful little girl to the world, whose name, Mihika, means “dew drops”.
This test can save the life of women like my colleague and save the life of women like those that I used to be interested in Karachi.
And the test is just the beginning. There is still no remedy for pre-declampsia, and preeclampsia is just one of many women-specific problems that need to be solved. If we could close the gap for nine main conditions, this would create 27 million years of healthy life per year – or about three additional healthy days a year for each individual woman on the planet.
That is the right thing. It is also a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, innovators and investors. Women around the world have been waiting for better solutions for too long. Together we can deliver.
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