Wellcome Leap and Pivotal, a group of organizations founded by Melinda French Gates, announced a groundbreaking $100 million partnership on September 10, 2025, to accelerate women’s health research and deliver breakthroughs in years rather than decades. The joint effort focuses on areas with the highest burdens of morbidity and mortality for women, including cardiovascular health, autoimmune disease, and mental health.
The funding addresses a critical gap in healthcare research, where women experience health issues differently and disproportionately compared to men, yet funding remains inadequate. Despite women living longer, they spend an average of nine years of their lives in poor health—25% more compared to men. Additionally, only 1% of global health research funding was allocated to women’s health conditions beyond cancer in 2020.
This new funding partnership will support the launch of two new women’s health programs beginning in 2026, using Wellcome Leap’s proven model for delivering breakthroughs. The investment pushes Leap’s total investment in women’s health to $250 million, bringing the organization closer to its ambitious goal of $1 billion in philanthropic capital dedicated to accelerating breakthroughs for conditions that disproportionately impact women at every life stage.
Melinda French Gates emphasized the urgency of addressing women’s health disparities, stating that women’s health is chronically underfunded and under-researched. She highlighted Wellcome Leap’s proven model as a way to see outcomes years or even decades sooner than through other approaches, calling it a unique opportunity for funders and partners to be part of something revolutionary.
Wellcome Leap’s approach has already shown tangible progress in existing programs. In their stillbirth prevention program, global research teams were mobilized in under 100 days, with emerging results showing evidence that a maternal blood test could predict conditions leading to stillbirth with greater than 80% accuracy as early as 12 weeks. Their initiatives also focus on reducing women’s lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s by 50% and shrinking the average time to diagnose and treat heavy menstrual bleeding from five years to five months.
The economic implications of closing the women’s health gap are substantial, with the potential to add more than $1 trillion to the global economy annually by 2040. Regina E. Dugan, CEO of Wellcome Leap and former Director of DARPA, leads the organization in applying DARPA’s model for human health on a global scale, marking the first-ever application of this approach to healthcare research.
The announcement represents a significant step toward addressing long-standing inequities in medical research and healthcare, where treatments and understanding of conditions affecting women have historically been based predominantly on male biology, despite women’s higher healthcare usage globally.