女性健康科技公司迎来投资热潮

Business

商业

Health technology -- Girls uninterrupted

健康科技——女孩们前赴后继

Femtech firms are enjoying an investment boom. About time.

女性科技公司迎来了投资热潮。是时候了。

A hormone called relaxin helps loosen up pregnant women’s hips.

一种叫做松弛素的荷尔蒙可以帮助孕妇放松臀部。

Without it, the pain of delivery would be unbearable.

没有它，分娩的痛苦将难以忍受。

Its job done, however, relaxin lingers in female bodies for up to a year, when softer ligaments make new mothers more prone to injury, as Jessica Ennis-Hill, an Olympic champion heptathlete, discovered in training after giving birth in 2014.

然而，正如杰西卡·恩尼斯-希尔（奥运会七项全能冠军）于2014年分娩后在训练中发现的那样，松弛素在女性体内会持续起作用长达一年之久，这时较软的韧带会使新妈妈们更容易受伤。

Five years later Dame Jessica started Jennis, a fitness app to help other women perform safe post-natal workouts.

五年后，杰西卡女爵士创办了健身应用软件Jennis，帮助其他女性进行安全的产后训练。

It now lets users optimise workouts for the different phases of their menstrual cycles, and has just concluded a successful funding round.

该应用软件现支持用户根据月经周期的不同阶段优化训练，并且刚刚成功完成了一轮融资。

Dame Jessica’s startup is part of a wave of “femtech” firms coming up with ways for women to overcome health problems specific to their sex.

杰西卡女爵士的初创公司是“女性科技”公司浪潮中的一员，这些公司想办法为女性解决这一性别特有的健康问题。

The market could more than double from $22.5bn last year to more than $65bn by 2027, reckons Global Market Insights, a research firm.

研究公司Global market Insights估计，到2027年，这一市场规模可能会增长一倍以上，从去年的225亿美元增长到逾650亿美元。

Having ignored it for years -- in 2020 femtech received only 3% of all health-tech funding, and a modest $14bn has been invested in it globally to date -- venture capitalists are at last waking up to the opportunity.

在忽视了女性科技多年之后——2020年，女性科技公司只获得了所有医疗科技投资的3%，全球对女性科技的投资迄今只有140亿美元——风险投资家们终于意识到了这个机会。

So far this year they have invested nearly $1.2bn in the industry, nearly half as much again as the annual record in 2019.

今年到目前为止，他们已在该行业投资近12亿美元，几乎是2019年创下的年度纪录的一半。

Last year Bayer, a big German drugmaker, paid $425m to buy KaNDy, a British developer of a non-hormonal treatment for menopause symptoms, and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s billionaire co-founder, backed BIOMILQ, a startup that has produced cell-cultured human breast milk and aims to bring both parents closer to their newborns.

去年，德国制药巨头拜耳公司斥资4.25亿美元收购了英国公司KaNDy，KaNDy研发出了更年期症状的非激素疗。微软联合创始人、亿万富翁比尔·盖茨投资了初创公司BIOMILQ，该公司生产细胞培养的人类母乳，为了让父母双方都能与他们的新生儿更加亲近。

In August Maven Clinic, an American startup which began as a femtech but has expanded to other areas of health, raised $110m and achieved “unicorn” status, with a valuation of more than $1bn.

今年8月，美国初创企业Maven Clinic融资1.1亿美元，达到了“独角兽”的地位，估值超过10亿美元。

In September Elvie, another British firm, raised $97m from venture-capital firms.

Maven Clinic最初是一家女性科技公司，但现已扩展到其他健康领域。9月，另一家英国公司Elvie从风险投资公司融资9700万美元。

Unlike heath tech aimed at men, which often focuses on erectile dysfunction, a condition that afflicts perhaps one in ten potential users, femtech offers products like period trackers, which could be of value to virtually all of the world’s 4bn women at some point in their lives.

针对男性的健康科技通常专注于勃起功能障碍，这一疾病困扰着大约十分之一的潜在用户，而与男性健康科技不同，女性科技提供的产品，比如月经追踪器，可能对世界上40亿女性中的几乎所有人的某个人生阶段都有价值。

Moreover, women are 75% likelier than men to adopt digital tools for health care.

此外，女性采用数字医疗工具的可能性比男性高75%。

That makes for a huge potential market.

这就造就了一个巨大的潜在市场。

A big reason femtech has been slow to grow has to do with the underlying medical science.

女性科技发展缓慢的一个重要原因与潜在的医学事实有关。

For conditions that affect all humans, men are more commonly studied, largely owing to misplaced worries that women’s hormonal fluctuations can confound results (male mice are favoured for the same reason).

对于影响全人类的疾病，针对男性的研究更加普遍，很大程度上是由于错误地担心女性的荷尔蒙波动会影响结果（出于同样的原因，研究中更常用雄性小鼠来做试验）。

In the few more inclusive studies, results are seldom disaggregated by sex, obscuring how diseases—and the drugs used to treat them—affect women differently.

在少数几个更具包容性的研究中，研究结果很少按性别分类阐明，模糊了疾病——以及用于治疗疾病的药物——对女性产生的不同影响。

“We have been operating as if women are just smaller versions of men,” observes Alisa Vitti, a hormone expert whose work on the 29-day “infradian” body clock, which affects everything from metabolism to sensitivity to pain and is a uniquely female phenomenon, underpins many period trackers.

荷尔蒙专家艾丽莎·维蒂观察到：“我们现在进行研究的方式就好像女性只是小号的男性。”她有关29日“月节律”生物钟的研究为许多月经追踪器提供着理论支撑，这一生物钟影响从新陈代谢到痛觉敏感性的方方面面，是女性特有的一种现象。

As a result, plenty of woman-specific health issues have, despite their ubiquity, been routinely neglected.

结果就是，尽管许多女性特有的健康问题普遍存在，却经常被忽视。

Femtechs help fill this research gap.

女性科技公司在帮助填补这一研究空白。

Noting that eight in ten women suffer from premenstrual pain but no treatments have been specifically designed to allay it, founders of Daye, a British startup, designed a tampon laced with cannabidiol, after observing that the vaginal canal has more cannabinoid receptors than any other part of the female body.

英国初创公司Daye的创始人注意到，80%的女性都遭受着经前疼痛的折磨，但是并没有专门设计的治疗方法用以缓解这种疼痛。该公司注意到女性阴道内的大麻素受体比她们身体的任何其他部位都多，于是设计出了一种含有大麻二酚的卫生棉条。

Hertility Health, also of Britain, offers non-invasive tests which can help diagnose nine common gynaecological conditions.

同样来自英国的Hertility Health公司提供非侵入性检测，可以帮助诊断九种常见的妇科疾病。

Elvie’s silent wearable breast pump is a best-seller in America and Britain; its app-controlled pelvic-floor trainer reduces the chances of the typical intervention, whereby surgeons insert “a fishing net and lift up your pelvic organs because they are falling out of your vagina”, says Tania Boler, the firm’s founder.

Elvie公司的无声可穿戴吸乳器在美国和英国都很畅销；该公司的创始人塔尼亚·博勒说，公司的盆底训练器由软件控制，减少了进行常规治疗的场景，在常规治疗中，外科医生会插入“一个渔网，撑起你正要从阴道中脱出的盆腔器官”。

That is welcome progress.

这是可喜的进展。

But too many femtechs face an uphill struggle.

但是太多的女性科技公司面临着艰难的斗争。

Helen O’Neill, who runs Hertility Health, calls the $5.7m funding round her firm closed in June a “soul-destroying” process.

Hertility Health的经营者Helen O'Neill称，她的公司在6月份结束了一轮570万美元的融资，她称其是“摧毁灵魂”的过程。

“It was predominantly grey-haired men saying they are not sure there is a market for this,” she says.

她说：“在场的大多是头发花白的男性，他们表示不确定这东西是否有市场。”

Never mind that all women with a reproductive system require gynaecological help at some point.

毫不在意这样的事实：所有拥有生殖系统的女性在某些时候都需要妇科方面的帮助。