Ferring and BioInnovation Institute announce collaboration to advance innovation in women’s health

The Swiss pharma company Ferring and the BioInnovation Institute have entered a strategic collaboration to accelerate innovation in women’s health.

BioInnovation Institute Foundation (BII) and Ferring have expanded their collaboration with the objective to advance life science innovation within women’s health.

New activities will include supporting BII to source, and potentially fund and incubate early-stage start-ups and projects within the field of reproductive medicine.

“The new strategic collaboration, highlights Ferring’s continued commitment to invest in early-stage innovation in this area, and we look forward to strengthening our collaboration with BII to accelerate new solutions for patients,” says Armin Metzger, executive vice president and chief science officer at Ferring.

The collaboration aims to build on Ferring’s engagement with BII’s Women’s Health Initiative through Ferring’s membership on the BII Women’s Health Innovation Panel.

Recent data shows women’s health remains an underserved field, with as little as one per cent of global healthcare research funding is invested in female-specific conditions beyond oncology.

Metzger says Ferring’s new collaboration aims to bridge the gap by supporting early-stage innovation, leveraging BII’s expertise in translational science incubation, together with Ferring’s expertise in early-stage development and reproductive medicine.

“Combining BII’s already proven incubation expertise with the industrial expertise and deep insights that Ferring has within women’s health forms a very strong basis for supporting and accelerating our mission of getting more solutions on the market that address the high unmet needs of 50 per cent of the world’s population,” adds Trine Bartholdy, chief innovation officer at the BioInnovation Institute.

“We are pleased to collaborate even closer with Ferring to make it happen.”

Per Falk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals president, has previously highlighted the importance of investing in women’s healthcare and reducing maternal mortality rates.

In an interview with ETHealthworld, he said: “We have an opportunity as a company to play an important role here, to address the innovation in access and we do that by using our unique innovations with therapies that can address the problem of postpartum haemorrhage and work with those who have presence on the ground where the therapy is needed to make sure that women can get access where they needed, wherever they are, however remote it is.”