Maneesha Ghiya Talks Femtech and the Way forward for Ladies’s Healthcare

With regards to improvements in healthcare, Maneesha Ghiya means enterprise.

As a enterprise capitalist and investor at hedge funds, the Harvard Enterprise grad has spent greater than 25 years — just about her whole profession — investing in healthcare.

However when a medical emergency virtually took her life, Ghiya noticed firsthand the necessity for innovation in girls’s healthcare particularly. So, she began her personal enterprise capital agency, FemHealth Ventures, to fill that hole.

FemHealth Ventures companions with companies to advance girls’s well being by medicines, gadgets, digital and synthetic intelligence, and diagnostics (imaging, checks and instruments).

The agency’s funding strategy seems to be at girls’s well being circumstances in 3 ways: “Solely girls” (endometriosis), “largely girls” (breast most cancers) and “otherwise in girls” (heart disease).

“We created and printed this framework in 2019, and it has since been adopted by many others throughout the healthcare business. By defining girls’s well being extra broadly, we’re capable of determine and convey ahead improvements that deal with circumstances throughout girls’s well being,” Ghiya stated.

We requested Ghiya for her ideas on the technology-based options which can be making waves in girls’s well being, and the way her personal well being scare impressed her ardour for change.

Our interview follows, edited for readability and size.

HealthyWomen: Inform us about your expertise with postpartum hemorrhage and the way it led to the launch of FemHealth Ventures?

Maneesha Ghiya: After I gave start to my daughter at Columbia College beneath the care of a high OB-GYN, I encountered critical problems.

What started as an emergency C-section became a disaster with an undetected inside bleed. 4 surgeons carried out a reoperation that was in the end unsuccessful in finding the supply, and I used to be transferred to the ICU, the place I underwent 10 transfusions of blood and platelets.

Thankfully, my physique caught up with the bleed, and I survived. However that ordeal fueled a want for me to make a distinction in girls’s well being, which led me to discovered FemHealth Ventures.

Read: Postpartum Hemorrhage Is a Deadly Problem >>

HW: Traditionally, we all know that girls’s well being has been neglected and underfunded. How is femtech serving to to broaden curiosity in girls’s well being?

Ghiya: We put money into medication, gadgets, diagnostics, and digital and synthetic intelligence within the girls’s well being area. We think about femtech a subset of girls’s well being and would see any software program or AI platforms tailor-made in the direction of girls’s well being falling into our digital and AI funding focus.

For instance, we invested in an organization referred to as Cercle AI. Its product analyzes affected person data inside a fertility clinic, permitting docs to rapidly entry knowledge on how related circumstances had been handled, together with protocols, success charges and negative effects.

This helps optimize therapy plans, resulting in greater success charges — which, for these aware of the IVF journey, is extremely impactful.

Read: Infertility Isn’t Just a Physical Journey — It’s an Emotional One, Too >>

HW: What are you discovering most fun on this planet of femtech proper now?

Ghiya: I’m excited to see how AI and robotics can elevate the usual of care throughout medical facilities.

One thrilling utility we see within the robotics and AI class is for needle-based procedures. As an illustration, think about epidurals throughout labor — 1 in 10 both fail or want adjustment as a result of every particular person has a special anatomy, which makes it difficult even for specialists to realize exact needle placement.

Certainly one of our portfolio corporations, Mendaera, has created a robotic needle-guidance system that mixes ultrasound imaging with robotic supply.

Past epidurals, this know-how could be utilized to procedures like nerve blocks and breast biopsies. It is a recreation changer as a result of, beforehand, solely extremely expert clinicians might carry out all these procedures with effectivity and accuracy. With this robotic and AI steering system, extra clinicians can ship needle-based care extra exactly, which is extremely impactful for sufferers who could not have entry to main medical facilities.

HW: Since launching FemHealth Ventures, inform us a few product/innovation that has been notably memorable for you.

Ghiya: We had been very excited when our portfolio firm Gynesonics was acquired in January by Hologic. At present, greater than 200,000 girls within the U.S. endure hysterectomies every year as a result of extreme and infrequently debilitating signs of fibroids.

Gynesonics affords a brand new answer: a non-surgical, outpatient process utilizing radiofrequency ablation. The process is incision-free, permitting girls to return to work as quickly as the following day — in comparison with the months-long restoration related to surgical procedure. Due to Gynesonics, lots of of hundreds of girls will keep away from hysterectomies. It was thrilling to see this superb innovation be dropped at extra girls by this acquisition.

HW: What large developments are you hoping to see in girls’s healthcare within the close to future, or what ought to we now have on our radar?

Ghiya: I’m excited to see extra options for girls within the postpartum depression (PPD) area. Sadly, maternal mortality charges within the U.S. have been on the rise lately, with PPD being a big contributor. In response to this pressing want, we invested in Reunion Neurosciences, which is growing a breakthrough drug remedy to deal with PPD.

It entails a one-time, four-hour therapy administered in a specialised facility by educated medical professionals [and has shown promising results in clinical trials]. The drug remedy is presently present process a full FDA trial and approval course of and can solely be obtainable beneath medical supervision.

Read: When Postpartum Depression Hit, I Heard Only the Lies My Depression Told Me >>

HW: What’s your recommendation for the way readers might help assist improvements in femtech?

Ghiya: We encourage anybody all in favour of supporting girls’s well being to remain knowledgeable.

My firm often posts articles on our LinkedIn about key updates within the girls’s well being area and updates from our girls’s well being targeted portfolio corporations. A terrific instance of a current replace within the girls’s well being area is the Gates Basis pledging $2.5 billion to girls’s well being initiatives. We’re thrilled to see the rising focus and momentum within the girls’s well being area.