Growing up, I’ve heard about ovarian cancer: a “silent killer”, often hard to detect – with the current standard for detection being routine abdominal ultrasounds. In 2025, 20,890 new women received a diagnosis and 12,730 women passed away. But hearing statistics doesn’t always help solidify how bad something is. For me, the realization that there really isn’t much we can do to combat ovarian cancer and that we needed to prioritize women’s health more came when I was a sophomore in high school. On a random September afternoon, I stumbled on a post made by Dr. Nadia Chaudhri’s Twitter (now X) account, where she revealed her ovarian cancer diagnosis, which was deemed terminal and incurable.
I kept on reading her posts and long-form thoughts each day, in awe of how she was able to find positivity and beauty despite what was happening to her. As the month went on, hope for a miracle grew within me; maybe the cancer would somehow go away. Then one day, Dr. Nadia Chaudhri stopped posting. I would visit her page every day for a week, hoping to see something. And, I did – it was a post written by her husband announcing that she had passed away. Chaudhri’s story was profiled in The New York Times, and she created a scholarship that enabled aspiring scientists, once in her position, to pursue graduate school and research. She left behind a young son.
Following Dr. Chaudhri’s journey from the spectator line made me see that there really aren’t comprehensive, surefire ways to detect ovarian cancer and other health conditions affecting women. Thus, I wanted to explore why that is and how we could fix that.
A Brief History
For most of modern medical history, there’s been a clear pattern. And that’s the fact that women have been systemically sidelined in healthcare research and policy. For instance, up until 1993, the National Institutes for Health (NIH) discouraged women with childearing potential to be included in Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials – an approach that resulted from drug-related incidents, particularly the use of thalidomide. Yet, the consequence of such a “cautious” approach was a shortage of data showing how drugs affect women.
There’s also been a prevalent stigma surrounding breast cancer and ovarian cancer, especially in the 1960s and 1970s where these diseases were often considered “unspeakable” conditions. Silence is dangerous, since without openly discussing breast and ovarian cancer, we build very little awareness, and women die. Research and therapeutic development is also not incentivized, meaning that the only choice for women just around sixty years ago was to undergo radical mastectomies – the standard of care at the time. However, in 1974, First Lady Betty Ford discussed her battle with breast cancer publicly; it was no longer a taboo subject. Thousands of women began to go for screenings, which are critical for catching breast cancer early.
In addition, there’s been consistent underinvestment in research concerning ovarian cancer and conditions affecting the female reproductive system. For example, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) cost the healthcare system in the US $4.3 billion in the US, affecting 1 in 10 women. Yet, the mean funding from 2016 to 2022 was $31.84 million vs $262.40 million for rheumatoid arthritis. And ovarian cancer receives around 20 times less funding compared to breast and prostate cancer, despite being more deadly.
The Role of Research & Biotech
As a result of more awareness, we see that FemTech – an era where academia and biotech companies have begun to prioritize women’s health – has been born. In 2024, the FemTech market saw a 55% year-over-year increase, with forecasts predicting that the market will reach $206.84 billion in 2033. Current products in this space include apps to better track menstrual cycles, as well as companies like NextGen Jane building off on current research involving menstrual fluid to create a product that analyzes the vast amount of biological data within it – DNA, RNA, proteins, hormones and the like.
Likewise, while strides have been made in treating breast and ovarian cancer – namely with the discovery of BRCA mutations in the 1990s and the development of monoclonal antibody treatments such as bevacizumab for ovarian cancer (which blocks vascular endothelial growth factor, a protein involved in helping tumors form new blood vessels) – there’s still a long way to go in understanding more prevalent conditions such as endometriosis and PCOS. Current research in this space focuses on correlations: for example, genome wide association studies (GWAS) attempting to identify genes and pathways linked to the development of endometriosis by analyzing genomic data from those with and without endometriosis.
While meta analyses provide valuable insights, there has to be a more robust way of approaching this problem and translating those insights into products. For example, right now, the gold standard for “treating” endometriosis is management through repeated laparoscopic excision surgeries and hormonal treatments to reduce the number of menstrual cycles. Some research labs – such as one opened recently in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory – are working to understand the mechanisms behind endometriosis through the use of organoid models, paving the way for therapeutics to target those mechanisms (I wrote about organoids in another post, linked here)!
Looking Ahead
While we’ve certainly made progress with women’s health research, there’s a long way to go (though, the same can be said about most open-ended problems in research). However, it’s only in recent decades that women’s health problems get the attention it deserves. And it’s important to maintain that momentum – through research and conversation.
