Femtech: from taboo to multibillion-dollar industry

The women’s healthcare market is rapidly expanding, with an ever-growing number of startups using new technology to develop innovative ‘femtech’ products.

Femtech encompasses a wide range of technologies that address female health issues, including menstruation, fertility, pregnancy and menopause. The term was coined in 2016 by Ida Tin, the creator of period and ovulation tracker Clue, because she wanted to legitimise an area of healthcare that has historically been under-researched and under-funded.

The global femtech market is now expected to reach $75 billion by 2025, according to data agency FemTech Analytics. Many innovators are already seizing this opportunity.

“What’s exciting about femtech is that there’s a lot of wide open space that entrepreneurs are trying to address,” says  Giordana Mahn, of counsel at Fish & Richardson.

Andrew Mears, partner and patent attorney at Mewburn Ellis , agrees. “There’s a huge opportunity in innovation and investment in femtech. A lot of the solutions and products that people generate in the femtech space have applications for 50% of the population. And so it’s a huge market as well.

“From an IP perspective the kinds of tools that exist for protecting inventions in medtech, and also in other industries, apply just as much to femtech.”

Overlooked

The “wide open space” in the market for femtech products reveals how little attention women’s health has received until recently. According to a March report by Mewburn Ellis,  Femtech - a growth industry, women’s health receives just 4% of healthcare research and development funding worldwide, with 90% of investment decision makers being men.

In a presentation given in November last year, Mahn and  Jacqueline Tio, principal at Fish & Richardson, highlighted how women have been under-represented in medical research. Until 1993, women of child-bearing age were excluded from participating in clinical drug trials, and from 1987 to 2012 women made up just 25% of participants across 31 landmark trials for congestive heart failure, despite cardiac disease being the number one killer of women.

A further barrier to investment in women’s health has been the ‘taboo’ around issues such as menstruation and menopause, making it more difficult to get products in these areas to market.

It’s not just in the health sector that the differences between male and female bodies have been overlooked. Technology around car safety has long been based on male crash test dummies, with the result that women are more likely to sustain injuries in car accidents.

Mahn believes these discrepancies present an opportunity for women inventors. She has heard inspiring personal stories which have led women to create incredible femtech products to help other women.

“If you put women together in a group, they will find solutions for women’s health issues,” she says.

“Women react differently to drugs, women present differently for different diseases than men. If you put women together, they will invent for women.”

However, Tio cautions that a lack of knowledge of IP rights could be holding some female inventors back.

“Even with the continued rise of femtech, we still don’t see a lot of focus on getting patents,” she says.

“We see a lot of potential, a lot of untapped space, for women inventors to obtain intellectual property rights in these areas that we haven’t seen historically.”

Mahn says she has encountered an inherent lack of knowledge of patents and their value among women, particularly Black women, which she attributes to a predominately white male leadership in the IP industry and lack of mentorships forming.

Tio concurs: “You need that extra push and exposure from both government and private companies to make an effort to equalise the playing field when it comes to obtaining IP rights.”

High-tech trend

The potential for IP rights in femtech is significant as there are so many products being developed, spanning multiple areas of women’s health.

Mears, a lead author of Mewburn Ellis’s report into femtech, says the most interesting finding of the research was the diversity, and variety of innovation in the sector. This includes a large number of companies incorporating smartphone capabilities into their products, such as Bristol startup Emm which has developed a smart menstrual cup that has sensors to detect volume and flow, and syncs with a user’s phone app.

This kind of innovation “has a great capability to give women insights into their own personal health that they can compare to the general population, in ways that weren’t previously available”, explains Mears.

His colleague and co-lead author, Rachel Oxley, partner and patent attorney at Mewburn Ellis, agrees that the sector is becoming more high-tech.

“In the past, a lot of the innovation was in fairly low-tech products, such as sanitary products. Increasingly we’re seeing developments in more high-tech areas,” she says.

Naturally some of these high-tech areas involve artificial intelligence (AI), which is changing the shape of so many industries. In femtech, its uses include enabling more accurate diagnosis of breast cancer, and powering women’s health platforms such as Flo Health.

As well as becoming more high-tech, women’s healthcare products are becoming more sustainable, with the development of plastic-free menstrual products and ‘eco’ pregnancy tests on the market such as Hoopsy, which is 99% paper and more than 99% accurate.

Global phenomenon

Femtech innovations are providing women with not only more choice, but the option to manage their health remotely. UK-based femtech firm Elvie developed a device for pelvic floor health that women can use at home, and secured a deal to make the product available through the NHS in 2018.

Swiss medtech firm Ava created the first FDA-cleared fertility tracker for ovulation prediction, which it said in 2021 had helped around 40,000 women to become pregnant. In France, the Omena app is designed to help women going through menopause to manage their symptoms.

Clearly, femtech is a global phenomenon. According to Fish and Richardson’s femtech report, there were 1,622 total patents and published applications worldwide in 2022, with 1,559 total trademark registrations worldwide.

However, one nation is leading the way in the sector; Mewburn Ellis’s report shows that of the top 20 most prevalent patent assignees in femtech since 2002, 11 are headquartered in the US. Six of the top 20 were based in Europe and three in Japan.

According to a snapshot of the industry in Q4 2022 by FemTech Analytics, the US and UK had the largest number of femtech companies. The US accounted for 47.8% of global femtech companies, Europe was second with 26.4%, followed by Asia with 12.6% and MENA with 5.5%.

A positive future

Despite the level of activity in the sector, there has been criticism that the term ‘femtech’ makes women’s health feel “niche” and “easy to ignore”.

However, Mahn believes the word has contributed to the success of new technology in women’s healthcare. “I think the movement of femtech has taken off because of this easy word to use,” she says. “It’s spreading awareness.”

Tio agrees, and adds that the coined term makes it easy to search for relevant companies online, and connect with others in the space.

Mewburn Ellis’s Oxley is optimistic about the direction femtech is heading. “I’m certain that in the future, women’s health issues will be taken more seriously. They will have more solutions available to them through the technology that these companies are coming up with,” she says.

“Femtech is developing massively and it’s going to have a real impact on women in the future. And I’m really looking forward to seeing how it develops,” she says.