Femtech World Awards 2026: Celebrating initiatives that move women’s health forward

By Wolfgang Hackl, CEO, OncoGenomX Inc., Allschwil, Switzerland

As the FemTech World Awards 2026 winners are revealed, it is a privilege to reflect on the Research Award 2026 sponsored by OncoGenomX Inc., and on the exceptional standard set by this year’s finalists.

On behalf of OncoGenomX Inc., sincere thanks to every applicant and congratulations go to the nominees whose work continues to push women’s health innovation forward.

Research Awards matter because they do more than recognize excellence in a single moment; they help elevate the science, courage, and systems thinking needed to transform women’s health at scale.

This year’s three finalists represented three different but equally important forms of progress. Natural Cycles brought forward one of the largest studies ever conducted on menstrual and ovulatory patterns in perimenopause, analysing nearly one million cycles from more than 197,000 women across over 140 countries.

That project stood out for both its dataset scale and its ability to translate new evidence into a regulated product designed to support women navigating a historically under-researched life stage.

IVI RMA stood out for scientific rigor and clinical precision. Its multicenter, double-blinded, non-selection study on non-mosaic segmental aneuploid embryos offered high-quality evidence on implantation and live birth outcomes, helping move fertility care away from assumption and toward a more evidence-based approach to embryo management and patient counseling.

UN ESCAP’s ‘Femtech in South-East Asia: Unlocking innovation for women’s health’ stood out for a different reason.

Rather than focusing on one product area or one clinical question, it mapped an entire emerging ecosystem.

The report examined the state of femtech across key South-East Asian markets, documented barriers such as financing gaps, stigma, weak ecosystem support, and data challenges, and then translated that research into practical recommendations for governments, investors, founders, and ecosystem builders.

In many ways, all three finalists are winners.

Each project excelled on core evaluation criteria including originality, relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability.

Each also offered something genuinely valuable to the future of women’s health: stronger evidence, clearer decision-making, more informed product development, and greater visibility for unmet needs that have gone too long without sufficient attention.

The final decision was therefore a genuine head-to-head race.

The jury supported its discussion with a numerical scoring approach, but it also looked carefully at systems impact: the extent to which a project not only advances one intervention, but improves the wider conditions under which innovation can emerge, scale, and endure.

That perspective mattered in this category, because the strongest research is not always only the most technically impressive; sometimes it is the research that opens doors for many future innovations to follow.

On that basis, the OncoGenomX Jury selected UN ESCAP as the winner of the Research Award.

The decisive factor was not simply that the report was comprehensive, though it was.

It was that the project helps change the environment around innovation itself.

It provides a practical roadmap for strengthening research, improving data governance, expanding founder support, addressing gender bias in investment, scaling innovative finance, and integrating women’s health more fully into policy and development agendas.

That broader enabling effect is what distinguished the UN ESCAP project. Natural Cycles demonstrated outstanding research translation, and IVI RMA demonstrated exceptional clinical rigor.

UN ESCAP, however, showed how research can influence the structures that determine whether many other femtech solutions will ever be funded, adopted, trusted, and scaled. In that sense, its impact reaches beyond one company, one product, or one clinical pathway, and toward a healthier innovation landscape overall.

Warm congratulations again to all finalists and nominees.

And special congratulations to UN ESCAP on receiving the OncoGenomX Research Award at the Femtech World Awards 2026.

The jury’s decision reflects deep respect for all three projects and a shared belief that women’s health advances fastest when excellent science is paired with the power to reshape the systems around it.