Welcome back to another episode of MedCity FemFwd, a podcast dedicated to discussing the breakthroughs and challenges in women’s health. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Renee Wittemyer, vice president of program strategy at Pivotal Ventures, and Dr. Regina Dugan, CEO of Wellcome Leap.
We discuss the organizations’ recent $100 million commitment to accelerate women’s health research and what they hope to achieve.
Here is an AI-generated transcript of the episode.
Marissa Plescia: Welcome back to another episode of MedCity Fem Ford. I’m Marissa Plescia, reporter from Med City News. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Renee Wittemyer of Pivotal Ventures and Dr. Regina Dugan of Wellcome Leap to discuss a recent $100 million commitment from the two organizations to advance women’s health research.
Marissa Plescia: Hi, Renee and Regina, thanks so much for joining MedCity FemFwd.
Renee Wittemyer: Thanks, Marissa. Great to be here. Yeah, likewise.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah, of course. And maybe just to start, um, Renee, maybe starting with you, can you just tell um, us a little bit more about yourself and the work that you do at your organization?
Renee Wittemyer: Sure. Yes. I work for Pivotal, which is a group of organizations founded by Melinda French Gates that is focused on social progress.
And so I am the VP of program strategy, meaning that I oversee our philanthropic, programmatic work. Um, a little bit of background about myself. I am a social scientist. Um, I’ve worked in a lot of. Developing countries around the world, listening to people’s stories, um, and really working at the intersection of gender tech society for many, many years.
Um, came to Pivotal about nine years ago and have been leading all sorts of different strategies for Melinda since then.
Marissa Plescia: Thank you, Renee and Regina, how about you?
Regina Dugan: I think I’m the nerd in the group here. I’m, I’m an engineer by training, but I’ve been doing work across many different disciplines. This latest at Welcome Leap in Global Health, um, from.
For a decade more, more than one decade now. Um, I am currently the president and CEO of Welcome Leap, which is an organization that was stood up by the welcome Trust in the uk with the goal of increasing the number of breakthroughs that we have in human health and doing so faster. So, um, in 2018, the Welcome Trust looked at their many years of work in global health and asked the question, has too much of our work gotten too risk averse, too siloed, too slow, and is the way we fund the work, partly responsible for that.
And so they created welcome leap in that spirit. We’ve been underway now for five years with I think, really good early results to show.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah. That’s really great. Andina, bringing it back to you. You know, your two organizations just, um, recently announced a partnership, um, to commit a hundred million dollars to Women’s health research.
Um, can you tell us a little bit about what you’re investing in and what you hope to achieve in this partnership?
Regina Dugan: Of course. So the a hundred million dollars partnership between Welcome Leap and Pivotal is devoted to two new programs to try and generate breakthroughs in areas of women’s health where women.
Really are suffering, um, with either morbidity issues or quality of life issues. The first program that we intend to launch is on women’s cardiovascular health, cardiovascular health, still cardiovascular disease, still the number one killer of women. Um, and we still think of it as a men’s dis, a men’s disease.
That’s o obviously not the case. Um, the second program will be devoted to either autoimmune or mental health issues that disproportionately affect women. With these two new programs that will bring our total investment to 250 million, we have three ongoing programs. Um, a quarter billion dollars invested in women’s health.
Marissa Plescia: Great. Wow, that’s awesome. Uh, Renee, is there anything you’d like to add there?
Renee Wittemyer: I would say that, you know, piv, we met probably 18 months ago, almost, um, two years ago, and just have been so impressed with welcome LEAP’s approach to r and d and thinking about breakthroughs. And for this topic, this has been a topic that Melinda has been focused on for many decades.
Like this is part of her career and life’s work and. We’ve just been thinking about what can we do in the space of women’s health to really accelerate the timeline for change? And women have suffered for too long without the best approaches. The right solutions to the chronic illnesses that they face and all of these things that, that Reina described.
And so we really wanted to partner with her to deliver these breakthroughs in an accelerated timeline. And so that is like the crux of why we wanted to partner with them, um, and why we’re so excited about the partnership. You
Regina Dugan: know, I think we shared, just to echo that, Renee, we share a real appreciation for the urgency of this, that the time for incrementalism is over.
Right? We need urgent advances in women’s health, um, in breakthroughs for women’s health. And precisely the way we do our work, I think is where we find the match. We just think it’s not okay. This underinvestment in the lack of progress, um, in advances for women’s health. We’ve just gotta fix it.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah, very well said.
Um, I also wanna follow up on something you mentioned about how you’re starting with, um, cardiovascular disease and autoimmune conditions. Um, how did you go about choosing those areas to invest in?
Regina Dugan: Renee, do you wanna start?
Renee Wittemyer: Sure. Um, so Regina mentioned this, but you know, women, as you know, Marissa, and have worked in this space for quite a while.
Women experience these health issues disproportionately and uniquely. And there’s just little research on how to prevent, to diagnose, to treat these conditions. And so we are really interested in looking across. The, the lifespan of a woman. Um, and as Reina was saying, looking at spaces where women experiences these things differently, like cardiovascular disease, it’s a space that presents differently in women.
The symptoms are different than men. They experience this because of biology of a woman’s body or the, the idea that women. They are experiencing health issues disproportionately, and that these things like autoimmune, autoimmune issues are predominantly affecting women. And so that was really at the crux of thinking about like, what are, how are women experiencing these things differently, disproportionately and uniquely that only affect women, um, reproductive health, breast cancer, endometriosis?
So those are the types of things in our mind that we’ve been thinking about, and it just. We just had this synergy with Regina and her vision of how she’s thinking about this. So it was like this beautiful partnership.
Regina Dugan: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. We have three ongoing programs, Marissa, and so some of the conversation we had is what would be complimentary to those programs, and particularly I think Melinda and Renee very interested across the whole span of life for a woman.
So cardiovascular and autoimmune definitely fit that category. I think, you know, autoimmune experience, 80% of the autoimmune cases are experienced by women. Um, and there’s something fundamental there. If you look at the amount of vascular remodeling that happens across the course of a woman’s life, whether we’re talking menstruation or pregnancy or even menopause, it’s not difficult to imagine.
That the vascular system, in particular cardiovascular health, would be affected differently by all of that remodeling across a woman’s lifespan. So cardiovascular is another space where we were really interested in pursuing new alternatives and advances for women.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah, very well said. Um, one thing we’ve spoken about a lot on this podcast, um.
Oftentimes women’s health is kind of just equated to being about reproductive health. Um, and that’s where a lot of the investment goes. Um, but what I think is interesting about this investment is that this, um, clearly targets other areas outside of, um, reproductive health. So is that part of your thinking at all as well?
Maybe Renee bringing it back to you.
Renee Wittemyer: I can say for Pivotal and Melinda, we’ve been thinking about health and when wellbeing in this very expansive way in, you know, across the lifespan of a woman and also including both the mental and physical health of women and of their families. And so we have been investing in this space really thinking about.
What does that look like for philanthropy? What role can philanthropy play to catalyze new ideas, catalyze breakthroughs, um, really support work on the ground that is happening, not just in reproductive health, but seeing that as part of the bigger picture, um, and a very holistic perspective in on that.
Regina Dugan: Yeah, I agree with that. You know, I think part of the way we think about it also is that for so long research has treated women as if they’re small men, right? Women are not small men, right? So health, if health affects them, um, differently, disproportionately and uniquely, because their biology is different.
Just to, I very often will talk about the how that manifests. I’ll just give you an example. 99% of the studies on the biology of aging do not include a model for menopause. Now, that’s just unacceptable. Half the population goes through this transition of life. So how can we not include the effects of menopause in the biology of aging?
And there are countless other examples that look just like this. Heavy menstrual bleeding is a condition that affects one in three women, and if we were bleeding from any other part of our body to that level, we would call an ambulance. Most women wait for five years to get help with heavy menstrual bleeding, and we have very few options to offer them.
Either we can shut down the reproductive cycle or we can remove the reproductive organs for a condition that affects. More women, one out of three women more than those in their reproductive years who are affected by asthma and diabetes. That’s just not an acceptable level of options for them.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah, some really great examples there.
Um, we’ve talked about this a bit, but maybe, um, if we could just go into a little bit more detail about some of the biggest challenges right now, um, when it comes to advancing women’s health research that you hope to address with this partnership. Uha, maybe starting with you on that one.
Regina Dugan: I think, and Renee has touched on this before, look, I think the work that we do at Welcome Lead is adapted from the model used at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or darpa.
Now, many people are not familiar with darpa, but their lives actually know darpa. So DARPA has perhaps the longest standing track record of radical, uh, breakthroughs in human history. For 60 plus years, the agency has been responsible for breakthroughs like. The internet originally, the ANet, that was a big one.
Micro electromechanical systems, laser technology, still technology. There’s a whole list, um, inclusive of some of the foundational investments in mRNA vaccines. So this particular model is driven by a sense of mission and urgency, and what we do is we conduct all of the work in a project format. What that means is if you want to get big things done in three years, you have to challenge everything about what is typically done.
And that means we, when it would typically take a year plus to evaluate applications, we do it in 30 days. It might take typically, uh, months to a year to negotiate a contract. We do that in 30 days. We work globally. We have a sense of agile and iterative development, always focusing on a goal. In five years, we’ve launched 14 programs.
We are working in 30 countries, and I think this is part of what this partnership is recognizing that that sense of urgency in the conduct of the research is partly what is so desperately needed in women’s health research.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah. Renee, would you like to add anything there?
Renee Wittemyer: Yeah, and I just kinda reinforce the message that just for too long we’ve been waiting and women suffer in silence and that is just not acceptable.
And we really, truly on the, the timeline piece see such an opportunity, but the idea of breakthroughs on a topic in three to five years, and I think when you’re thinking about the challenges in this space, the challenges include a lack of funding. There is not enough funding or attention to women’s health as a space that really deserves its own intentional approach, agenda, strategy, and investment.
And we see this as this opportunity to spark more investment, more partnership from philanthropists, from investors, from the industry leaders who share a vision for a healthier, equitable future for women. Um, and I think that is this opportunity is to bring in more funding to this space, especially in this environment where a lot of funding has been cut for this topic.
Regina Dugan: Yeah, exactly. And let me give you a sense. Marissa of what’s possible. So in one of our early, in fact, our first women’s health program at Welcome Leap, the End Utero program, which is focused on reducing stillbirth and making advances in maternal care, you know, we have had, we, we haven’t had advances in maternal care for about a hundred years, right?
We still use basically the same tools that we used a hundred years ago. And yet in the world, every 16 seconds a child is born still. 2 million babies. We lose a year. Families tragedies associated with that. Now we went very specifically after advances in maternal care with the goal of reducing, basically pointing to reductions in stillbirth by half.
And within about two years, we had line of sight on a maternal blood test that could, with 80% predictive accuracy, tell us whether a pregnancy was at risk for fetal growth restriction, preeclampsia, or gestational diabetes as early as 12 weeks in the pregnancy. Now we have never had those kind of tools before in maternal care.
That’s what’s possible using this kind of approach, focusing it on women’s health research and applying the kind of research and engagement urgency that’s needed for these topics.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. That’s, that’s a really great example. Um, Renee, bringing it back to you, you talked a little bit about why you chose Welcome Leap as a partner.
Can you go into a little bit more detail on that?
Renee Wittemyer: So I’ll just zoom out a little bit. So Pivotal has this mission to advance women’s power and influence, and we truly believe that you cannot have power and influence if you don’t have your health. And these two things are inextricably linked. So when we think about funding in this way, building on Melinda’s, you know, decades of investment in this space and leadership in this space, we’ve been thinking about a couple.
Um, in 2024, we funded something called the Action for Women’s Health, which was really funding community-driven ideas, advocacy for policy change, um, groups working on the ground to support women’s mental and physical health. And that’s really all about. Lifting up these ideas and solutions that are underfunded.
We’ve also funded, uh, 12 global leaders who are each overseeing $20 million for innovative work in women’s health and wellbeing around the world from Nigeria we have, or global leaders in the United States. Um, and then we see this as part of a really focus on innovation. And this idea that, you know, we have these existing solutions, but what doesn’t exist And really being able to partner Witha to look out into the future and imagine a different future.
That is why we truly were interested in what this approach was. Her specific, um, methodology of how they do it and the rigor in their. Um, strategy and agenda. So that is kind of the, the crux of why we partnered with them.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah, well said. And bringing up, bringing it back to you. Um, on the flip side, why did you cho choose to partner with Pivotal Ventures?
Regina Dugan: Well, I think we share a sense that it, it’s time women, women have waited long enough and we, we definitely need to make advances across the board in care. But as Renee said. We have chasms, um, of gaps in our understanding of women’s health, and that is the result of decades of underinvestment in research devoted to the advances they need to live healthy and productive lives.
And we’ve just got to change that, right? We, it is not about creating breakthroughs for women is not a matter of chance. It’s a matter of choice. So we’re choosing to invest accordingly.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah. Yeah. And going off of that, you know, I really just have one que one last question for the both of you. Um, how will you track the success of this investment?
And do you have any plans for future investment? Uh, Ragina, I’ll bring that back to you.
Regina Dugan: I mean, we have, as Renee mentioned, we have a lot of rigor in how we conduct the programs. It’s a very high touch process. It’s best in class, agile, iterative, always tracking towards a goal, but with, at the same time the kind of risk appetite needed to generate the kind of breakthroughs that we’re talking about here.
So when we think about it, we, we actually start every program with the end goal in mind. So if we don’t have a sense. Of what impact we’re trying to create with, um, a bold goal that is also testable and measurable. We don’t start. So what we are doing through the conduct of the program is we are watching and tracking and doing the adjustments needed to get to the end goal.
So, um, stay tuned for the specifics on cardiovascular and autoimmune, but I can give you a sense from the prior programs of what that looks like. So, in the case of utero, can we generate, can, can we generate the advances necessary to show we could reduce still bursts by half? In the case of our program devoted to Alzheimer’s, can we reduce Alzheimer’s risk for women for 330 million women globally?
Can we reduce their risk by half so that it isn’t true that two out of every three of our Alzheimer’s patients are women? The risk is double that for women as it is for men. And in the case of our missed vital sign, uh, program, which is devoted to heavy menstrual bleeding, can we actually get diagnosis and treatment?
From five years down to five months. So it’s those kinds of activities that we are tracking towards the goal of each of those programs.
Marissa Plescia: Great. Uh, Renee, would you like to add something there?
Renee Wittemyer: I would say that for us, tracking success is a mean, this is a bold vision. This has not been tried before, and it is, do we have a breakthrough on these topics in three to five years?
Do we have people who are seeing and kind of bring, coming together as funders around this vision? And I would also say success is. Lifting up someone like, uh, Ragina in terms of her leadership and, and vision and sh and shining a light on that for others because that is how we partner and we see philanthropy is taking these investments in leaders that we truly believe in.
And we share their vision, we share their values, and we want to support them and back them. And that is an example of women’s power and influence. Andina embodies that in spades. Um, and so part of it is really just shining a light on that in addition to these ideas that we’re gonna have these breakthroughs.
That is success. And also, if you don’t have the breakthrough, we have put, we have invested in this space, we took a chance. That is the role of philanthropy, is to make a bet, may take a big bet on something you believe in, and that is how philanthropy can push progress and social progress for all.
Regina Dugan: Well, Renee, I’ll tell you that I am humbled and grateful for your confidence in me personally and also in Welcome Leap, and I think, uh, Renee is correct.
You know, when we are taking these big swings, part part, not every program is going to be successful, but even if we have success in a limited number of them, we will change the future for women.
Marissa Plescia: Yeah, that is such a great way to look at it. Um, well this has been such an interesting conversation. Thank you both so much for joining and best of luck on your partnership and your commitment.
Really appreciate it.
Regina Dugan: Thank
Renee Wittemyer: you so much.
Regina Dugan: Thank you.
