News
NHS must “keep pace” with femtech innovations to tackle gender health gap
As women increasingly turn to technology to plug the gender health gap, NHS leaders have highlighted the importance of “keeping pace” with innovation in the femtech sector.
Earlier this month, the Women and Equalities Select Committee continued an ongoing inquiry into women’s reproductive health conditions which began under the previous Conservative government.
Samantha Niblett, Labour MP for South Derbyshire and founder of Labour Women in Tech, led a discussion on how the NHS can leverage femtech to improve treatment and care, highlighting the increasing prevalence of apps for women’s health, such as menstrual cycle tracking, birth control, fertility and pregnancy and menopause.
The number of UK femtech companies has grown considerably over the last decade, from just nine in 2013 to 58 in 2023, according to some figures —an increase of more than 500%. In 2021, over half of women aged between 18 and 24 reported using a women’s digital health platform at least once a month, a statistic which is likely to be significantly higher today.
Dr Sue Mann, NHS England’s first national clinical director for women’s health, told the committee that the public sector must “understand the [femtech] space better” to help people navigate it in a way which is helpful for their health.
“There is an explosion of femtech apps and I think that it’s our job to help people navigate through them,” she said.
But the NHS must focus on improving its own digital solutions too.
“We need to get better at producing our own digital information,” Mann added.
“We need to get out into the space to really understand that a little bit better.”
The need for innovation in women’s health
Women’s health and the inequalities women face in access to healthcare present a complex challenge for the public health sector, with women spending a significantly greater proportion of their lives in ill health and disability when compared with men. Last week the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists called for urgent government funding for women’s health and care in the UK, as research shows gynaecology waiting lists have doubled since 2020, with three quarters of a million women now waiting for treatment.
Following the publications of the Women’s Health Strategy for England, The Scottish Women’s Health Plan, and the Women’s Health in Wales discovery report, which have all outlined strong evidence of the need for a greater focus on women’s health, femtech companies have been encouraged to come forward and help address these challenges.
The UK’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) Healthcare launched its funding call, Competition 25 in July 2024, offering selected femtech companies the opportunity to develop and roll out new technologies within the NHS.
The scheme is said to have received around 200 applications for early-stage innovators and breakthrough technologies to address three priority areas of Gynaecological Conditions and Hormonal Health, Mental Health and Chronic Conditions and Long-term Health.
Phase 1 contracts are set to begin in January 2025 for up to six months and will provide funding and support to carry out technical and commercial feasibility testing worth up to £100,000. If successful, these projects will be entitled to apply for a 12 month Phase 2 contract, worth up to £800,000 for prototype development and collection of early clinical evidence.
The committee also heard how as part of NHS England’s transformation directorate, work is ongoing to understand the femtech landscape, including what innovations are in the pipeline and where the gaps may be.
There are now 15 Health innovation networks across the UK, bringing together NHS, industry, academic, third sector and local organisations, with more than 1,200 technologies in the pipeline to address health and care challenges. The introduction of early value assessments has also enabled NICE to fast-track the assessment of digital products such as menopause apps, allowing for technologies that address unmet needs to be rolled out quicker.
Striking the right balance
However, the NHS must strike the right balance between supporting innovation, whilst maintaining objectivity and avoiding conflicts of interest.
Niblet highlighted a culture in the NHS of discouraging doctors and clinical experts from being “entrepreneurial”.
Meanwhile, there are some legitimate concerns about the intentions of companies in the femtech space. Period tracker apps, for example, have previously attracted attention from regulators in relation to their collection and use of intimate health data.
Dame Lesley Regan, women’s health ambassador for England and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Imperial College suggested that the NHS needs a system in place to “sort through” femtech companies and only commission those which are “altruistic” and “actually want to improve lives”.
But Mann cautioned against “putting off” innovators.
“There’s some amazing apps, and there’s some lower quality apps, and trying to keep pace with that is really difficult,” she added.
“It’s really important to be balanced and look at things objectively. To make sure that the decisions that get taken are purely on the basis of improving health and care information.”
An early PET scan after one cycle of chemotherapy may help predict how aggressive breast cancer responds to treatment, a study suggests.
Research led by The Institute of Cancer Research, London and King’s College London suggests that an early scan taken after one cycle of chemotherapy could help predict how well a patient’s cancer will respond to treatment.
The study focused on patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive form of the disease in which cancer cells lack receptors for the hormones oestrogen and progesterone, as well as the HER2 protein.
Patients with TNBC are usually treated with chemotherapy prior to surgery. While many respond well, residual disease at surgery, typically around six months later, is associated with a significantly poorer prognosis. Identifying people sooner who are unlikely to respond remains a major clinical challenge.
The research explored whether using PET imaging shortly after treatment begins, rather than relying only on MRI scans later in the treatment process, could provide earlier insight into how a patient’s cancer is responding. Twenty-two patients were recruited, with fourteen undergoing FDG-PET scans before treatment and after the first cycle of chemotherapy.
The findings, published in Clinical Cancer Research, showed that changes seen on PET scans after just one cycle of chemotherapy were strongly associated with subsequent response, including whether there was no detectable cancer, known as a complete response, by the end of treatment. Importantly, early PET response showed stronger associations with treatment outcomes than standard mid-treatment MRI scans in this study.
Being able to identify patients who are not responding well at an early stage could allow clinicians to adjust treatment sooner or consider alternative approaches. These findings may also support future strategies to better tailor treatment intensity to individual patients.
The study also compared two types of PET tracers, FDG and FLT, to determine which was most suitable. While both met the study’s technical criteria, FDG-PET was selected for further evaluation due to its better image quality, greater consistency and wider use in clinical practice.
The research also explored how imaging changes after just one cycle of chemotherapy relate to the body’s immune response to treatment. Biopsies taken before and after the first cycle of chemotherapy showed that an increase in immune cells within the tumour was strongly associated with both early PET changes and improved treatment outcomes.
The researchers emphasise that these findings now need to be validated in larger studies. Future work will aim to confirm these results in broader patient groups and explore more accessible imaging approaches, such as ultrasound, alongside PET and MRI.
Sheeba Irshad, professor of cancer immunology at King’s College London and lead of the Breast Cancer Now KCL Research Unit, said:
“In patients who had PET scans both before treatment and after the first cycle, we found that this early scan could predict whether they were likely to achieve a complete response by the end of treatment. These findings highlight the potential of early imaging to guide treatment decisions, and now need to be validated in larger, modern clinical trials.”
Andrew Tutt, professor of breast oncology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said:
“Research that helps us determine early who is already benefitting from standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy and who might benefit from clinical trials to find better treatments is vital. This study shows that FDG-PET may have great value in this regard. We hope to be able to design studies that further investigate and validate these findings.”
The study was supported by funding from King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Breast Cancer Now, Cancer Research UK, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity.
We are excited unveil the three finalists competing for one of the Femtech World Awards’ most coveted honours: the Startup of the Year Award, sponsored by Future Fertility.
This award celebrates an early-stage company making a bold impact in women’s health through innovation, vision and execution.
The winner will be announced at our virtual ceremony on 19 June, with the decision made by a representative from category sponsor Future Fertility.
Congratulations to the shortlist and thank you to everyone who entered or nominated.
Startup of the Year Shortlist
Hello Inside is the first women’s health AI company to turn daily metabolic signals into outcomes women feel and healthcare systems reimburse.
Women’s health has long been under-researched, and current AI benchmarks fail on women’s health questions roughly sixty percent of the time.
Hello Inside built the architecture to close that gap.
Across four years and 12,000+ validated metabolic profiles, three in four women improve at least one symptom within ninety days.
They lose four kilograms in three months, moving from overweight into the healthy range. In a clinical study with Alisa Vitti’s Flo Living, 91.9 per cent reduced PMS burden within sixty days.
U-Ploid is an early-stage biotechnology company tackling one of the most fundamental challenges in fertility care: the sharp, age-related decline in egg quality that limits outcomes across IVF and egg freezing.
While much of the field focuses on improving assessment and selection, U-Ploid is developing a first-in-class therapeutic approach designed to improve egg quality itself by addressing the biological causes of age-related chromosomal errors.
Supported by strong preclinical evidence and now advancing into human studies, U-Ploid combines scientific rigour, regulatory discipline and long-term vision to help redefine what is possible in fertility care.
Gestational diabetes is a strong risk factor for future type 2 diabetes, even in women with normal pre-pregnancy weight, according to a study at the University of Gothenburg.
The researchers call for earlier testing and better follow-up.
“Our results show that gestational diabetes functions as a kind of stress test for the body’s ability to manage blood sugar, and identifies women with a greatly increased risk of future type 2 diabetes”, said Jon Edqvist, PhD and affiliated to research at the University of Gothenburg, and operating room nurse at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
Gestational diabetes is a special type of diabetes that can affect pregnant women.
The condition is defined as elevated blood sugar levels, without previously known diabetes. Treatment involves self-monitoring of blood sugar, advice on lifestyle habits and, if necessary, medication.
Identifying gestational diabetes is important because the disease increases the risk of complications such as preeclampsia, the need for a cesarean section and high birth weight for the baby.
Those who have had gestational diabetes are also at higher risk of later developing type 2 diabetes.
In the current study, published in eClinicalMedicine, researchers now show that gestational diabetes is a strong indicator of future risk of developing type 2 diabetes, even in women with normal weight before pregnancy.
Elevated risk even with normal weight
The study is based on data from the Medical Birth Registry on just over 1.15 million first-time mothers in Sweden, who gave birth between 1987 and 2019. 16,870 women with confirmed gestational diabetes were compared with age-matched women without the diagnosis. The median follow-up period was nine years.
The results show that women with a BMI of 35 and above, i.e. severe obesity, had an almost tenfold increased risk of developing gestational diabetes compared to women with normal weight.
The risk of subsequent type 2 diabetes also increased with higher BMI, but it was significantly increased even with normal weight, which the researchers describe as particularly worrying.
More follow-up and more studies
The researchers behind the study welcome the recently updated recommendations on gestational diabetes in Sweden, where a higher proportion of pregnant women at increased risk are expected to be offered testing earlier in pregnancy, and if necessary, interventions.
“Diagnostics and care of gestational diabetes have looked very different in different parts of the country,” said Annika Rosengren, professor at the University of Gothenburg.
“There is a need for both improved follow-up after gestational diabetes, and more studies that investigate how such follow-up affects future health and prognosis”
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