A groundbreaking women’s health funding initiative was announced on September 10, 2025, as Wellcome Leap and Pivotal committed $100 million to accelerate research into critical areas of women’s health. This partnership between the U.S.-based nonprofit Wellcome Leap and Pivotal, the philanthropic organization founded by Melinda French Gates, represents one of the largest private investments in women’s health research in recent years.
The joint funding effort specifically targets areas where women experience the highest rates of mortality and morbidity, including cardiovascular health, autoimmune diseases, and mental health conditions. This strategic focus addresses long-standing gaps in medical research where women’s health issues have been historically underfunded and under-researched.
Partnership Details and Research Focus
The $100 million commitment is split equally between the two organizations, with $50 million coming from Wellcome Leap and $50 million from Pivotal. This partnership will support the launch of two new women’s health research programs scheduled to begin in 2026, utilizing Wellcome Leap’s proven accelerated research model.
Wellcome Leap, led by CEO Regina E. Dugan, the former director of DARPA, applies a unique approach to medical research that aims to deliver breakthroughs in years rather than decades. The organization has already demonstrated success in women’s health initiatives, including programs focused on reducing stillbirth rates and developing early detection methods for pregnancy complications.
The funding will specifically target research in cardiovascular health, where women often experience different symptoms and outcomes compared to men. Autoimmune diseases, which disproportionately affect women at rates significantly higher than men, will also receive focused attention. Mental health research will address the fact that women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience major depression.
Addressing the Women’s Health Gap
This major funding announcement comes at a critical time when the women’s health gap has become increasingly recognized as both a medical and economic issue. According to recent data, women globally spend an average of nine years of their lives in poor health, which is 25 percent more compared to men. Despite living longer, women often experience those additional years with reduced quality of life due to inadequately treated health conditions.
The funding gap in women’s health research is stark, with only 1 percent of global health research funding allocated to women’s health conditions beyond cancer in 2020. Additionally, just 2 percent of all venture capital health investments focus specifically on women’s health issues, highlighting the chronic underinvestment in this critical area.
Melinda French Gates emphasized the urgency of this initiative, stating that women’s health has been chronically underfunded and under-researched, resulting in conditions that are not well understood. She noted that the partnership with Wellcome Leap’s proven model could deliver outcomes years or even decades sooner than traditional research approaches.
The economic implications of addressing the women’s health gap are substantial. Research indicates that closing this gap could add more than $1 trillion to the global economy annually by 2040, making this not just a moral imperative but an economic opportunity.
Building on Existing Success
This new partnership builds on Wellcome Leap’s existing women’s health portfolio, bringing the organization’s total investment in women’s health to $250 million. The organization is working toward a bold goal of mobilizing $1 billion in philanthropic capital dedicated to accelerating breakthroughs for conditions that disproportionately impact women.
Wellcome Leap’s current women’s health programs have already shown promising results. Their maternal care program, focused on cutting stillbirth rates in half, mobilized global research teams in under 100 days and has identified potential for a maternal blood test that could predict conditions leading to stillbirth with greater than 80 percent accuracy as early as 12 weeks of pregnancy.
The organization is also working on programs to reduce women’s lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 50 percent and to shrink the average time to diagnose and treat heavy menstrual bleeding from five years to five months.
This announcement represents part of a broader movement in women’s health funding, with other major initiatives including the Gates Foundation’s commitment of $2.5 billion through 2030 and ARPA-H’s Sprint for Women’s Health, which has awarded approximately $113 million to various research teams.