Since Melinda French Gates split from her husband and, more recently, their foundation, she has centered her giving on promoting the power of women and girls. Last year, French Gates announced a $1 billion investment through 2026 “for people and organizations working on behalf of women and families around the world, including on reproductive rights in the United States.”
Then, last week, as part of that $1 billion, French Gates committed $50 million to promote women’s health. The grant kicks off a partnership between Pivotal, French Gates’ philanthropy, and Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit health research accelerator. The goal? To turbocharge treatment of women’s health — in areas like cardiovascular health, autoimmune disease and mental health — that take the greatest toll.
“If we want to unlock women’s power, women’s health is key,” said Renee Wittemyer, Pivotal’s vice president of program strategy. “Women can’t thrive if they’re not healthy. It’s a fundamental barrier to equity and to social progress.”
Pivotal elected to partner with Wellcome Leap at least in part because of its path-breaking, fast-paced approach to developing solutions to health challenges. Wellcome Leap is a spinoff of U.K.-based global health philanthropy Wellcome Trust. In a 2022 report, IP’s Paul Karon noted the nonprofit’s ambitious goal “to solve huge, long-standing problems in human health, faster and more successfully than has been achieved in the past, by challenging some of the conventions and structures of science and health research.”
Wellcome Leap was already focusing on women’s health before the Pivotal partnership. CEO Regina Dugan points out that the organization has a female founder and CEO, and half of its program directors are women, so focusing on women’s health made perfect sense. “When we launched our first women’s health program, it’s not as if we asked anyone’s permission or thought it was odd,” she said. “We’re super proud of it, obviously, but when we did it, we didn’t question whether or not we should do it. Of course we should.”
One of the organization’s projects aims to cut rates of still births; another is targeting Alzheimer’s (close to two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women), and a third is focused on causes and treatment of heavy menstrual bleeding.
For the new initiative, Wellcome Leap will match Pivotal’s $50 million. That will bring Leap’s total commitment to $250 million toward a goal of $1 billion in philanthropic capital to accelerate breakthroughs in the treatment of conditions that disproportionately affect women. Dugan said Pivotal is Wellcome’s “first significant partner” in the area of women’s health.
The goal is to right a long-standing imbalance in health research. In 2020, for example, only 1% of global health research funding was focused on women-specific health conditions (aside from cancer) according to Nature. The National Academies of Science concluded that over the last decade, national funding for women’s health research in the U.S. has decreased as a share of overall NIH funding — comprising only about 8% of total funding during that period. And even though women live longer than men, they spend more of their lives in poor health — 25% more than men, according to McKinsey.
“It’s really shocking,” said Dugan. “So much research over the years has assumed that if you solve the problem for men, you will solve it for women, and that’s just not true. Women experience health differently, disproportionately and uniquely. We’ve got to stop treating these conditions for women as if they’re medical mysteries. These are problems that can be solved.”
French Gates agrees. “Women’s health is chronically underfunded, chronically under-researched, and, as a result, not well understood,” she said when the initiative was announced. “We need to look at this broken status quo through new eyes and stop tolerating women’s pain and suffering.”
Wellcome Leap’s approach: “Team science on steroids”
Regina Dugan, who now heads Wellcome Leap, was also the first woman to lead the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Over the years, DARPA’s pioneering research led to the development of innovations including the internet, miniaturized GPS, lasers, stealth technology and early versions of mRNA technology.
At Wellcome Leap, Dugan has deployed the DARPA approach to address global health. Under this model, projects have a three-year time frame. They are set up quickly and marshall scientists and labs around the world to address a specific issue. “What we do is we stand up a team, which is cross disciplinary, cross [organizational], and in our case, [crosses] national borders,” Dugan said. “Their goal is to work toward the specific aims of the program across the three-year time box. It’s very high touch. The program director essentially serves as the CEO — their job is to synchronize all of the activities to maximize the probability of getting to the breakthrough. So it’s a very dynamic environment for the full three years. I think that’s how we get to these breakthroughs as often as we do, because of the collaboration and high-touch [approach]. It’s essentially team science on steroids.”
Wellcome Leap’s unique approach impressed the Pivotal team — and so did its areas of focus. “Their model delivers breakthroughs for extremely complex problems in three to five years, and that is very different from research approaches that can take decades,” said Wittemyer. “They move very quickly, and that speed is really important to us. Also, it is looking at issues like cardiovascular disease that present differently in women.”
For the partnership with Pivotal, Wellcome Leap will focus on cardiovascular disease in women. It will address one other area as well — either autoimmune disease (80% of autoimmune disease patients are women) or women’s mental health. “We are investigating whether the second program will be autoimmune disease or some of the mental health issues specific to women,” Dugan said. “We have not made a decision there yet.” The programs will launch next year.
Last week, when French Gates and Dugan appeared on stage at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit, Dugan said she is optimistic that the partnership will yield breakthroughs in women’s health in a matter of years — not decades. “The time for incrementalism is over,” she said. “Women have waited long enough.”
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Wittemyer and Dugan both said that the women’s health initiative is not a response to the Trump administration’s evisceration of medical and other areas of scientific research. Women’s health has long been a French Gates priority, as Wittemyer pointed out. “Melinda has spent such a huge part of her career focusing on women’s health, and it has been a space of advocacy for her for decades,” she said. “This is something that she has a long-standing passion for. It’s very central to her work.”
Intentional or not, the timing is right on, given the administration’s devastating cuts at every level of medical research. In a recent New York Times report, “Trump is Shutting Down the War on Cancer,” Michael Lauer, a former NIH deputy director, called the damage to cancer research “an absolutely unmitigated disaster. It will take decades to recover from this, if we ever do.”
Women’s health is at particular risk, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, and it is one more area where, with the government stepping out, philanthropy can have a major impact. Dugan hopes that more funders will join Pivotal to support Wellcome Leap’s work on women’s health. “We would happily welcome additional contributors,” she said. ”It’s safe to say that Melinda and I share this perspective. We’ve just got to meet the scale of the challenge.”
Wittemyer underscored the role funders can play. “Philanthropy has always been a force for advancing all of these issues — from health to education — both in the U.S. and globally,” she said. “In these moments, we’re reminded of the resilience, the commitment that the philanthropic sector can make to drive positive change. Now more than ever, it’s essential that we’re all coming together across sectors, across geographies, to ensure that progress continues.”
