Melinda French Gates launches $100 million push for women’s health research

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(spells out million in paragraph 2)

By Jennifer Rigby

LONDON (Reuters) – Philanthropist Melinda French Gates will invest $50 million in a women’s health fund that aims to close a vast gender gap in medical research, she said on Wednesday.

French Gates, whose Pivotal group joins the non-profit Wellcome Leap in the partnership worth $100 million overall, pointed to data showing only 1% of pharmaceutical research funding went to women’s health outside cancer in 2024.

The aim of the partnership is to accelerate research in areas with the highest burdens of disease and death, and which often affect women differently or disproportionately when compared to men, including cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, and mental health. 

“We have chronically underfunded these areas,” she said, telling Reuters in an interview that women’s health had always been a side issue and she wanted to make it central.

French Gates has advocated for women’s health for several decades in her work at the Gates Foundation, which she exited in 2024. It is now fronted solely by her ex-husband, Bill Gates. 

The new partnership comes a month after the Gates Foundation launched its own pledge to spend $2.5 billion by 2030 on “ignored” women’s health. French Gates said she welcomed the pledge due to the vast funding gap in women’s health research, and hoped the organizations, as well as other partners and funders, may work together on the issue in future.  

Pivotal and Wellcome said in a statement it should no longer be the case that women spend more of their lives in ill-health or face a higher chance of being misdiagnosed with a heart attack than men. Women also deserve answers about why 80% of autoimmune disorder patients are female, and two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients, they said. 

The gap is vast and long-standing, French Gates added; it only became the law that women should be included in clinical trials in the United States in 1993. 

“For too long, women have been told to endure what should be treatable, to accept conditions as ‘mysteries’ rather than problems worth solving,” said Regina Dugan, chief executive of Wellcome Leap, which has already invested $150 million in women’s health projects since it was founded in 2020. 

The new partnership will choose two key projects by the end of 2026, and aim for results within 3-5 years, the founders said.       

(This story has been refiled to spell out the word “million” in paragraph 2)

(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)