Hi there,

Welcome to Issue #135!

⬇️ This week’s highlights! ⬇️

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Why are some of the most common and serious diseases affecting women still diagnosed late — or missed altogether?

Autoimmune disease and heart disease are neither rare nor poorly understood. They affect millions of women and drive enormous healthcare utilization and long-term cost. Yet women routinely spend years seeking autoimmune diagnoses, and heart disease remains the leading cause of death among women despite persistent under-recognition in clinical care.

The explanation isn’t simply lack of awareness — or even individual bias.

Underdiagnosis is often the downstream consequence of how healthcare systems are built. Research populations determine what “typical” disease looks like. Reimbursement models determine how much time clinicians can spend investigating complex symptoms. Clinical guidelines and risk tools determine who gets flagged — and who doesn’t.

When those systems are optimized for faster, single-organ diseases studied primarily in male populations, conditions that evolve gradually or present differently become much easier to miss.

Autoimmune disease and women’s cardiovascular disease make this structural mismatch visible.

Autoimmune disease rarely announces itself clearly.

Symptoms often appear slowly — fatigue, joint pain, cognitive changes, gastrointestinal issues — crossing multiple organ systems over years. Diagnosis depends on pattern recognition across time, specialties, and patient history.

But modern healthcare isn’t designed for longitudinal detective work.

Short visits, fragmented specialty care, and reimbursement models that reward volume over complexity make extended diagnostic journeys financially difficult for both patients and providers. Women are frequently cycled between specialists before anyone connects the dots.

The result is familiar to many patients: symptoms minimized, stress blamed, and years lost before treatment begins.

A growing group of companies is redesigning autoimmune care around how chronic disease actually behaves.

Companies like WellTheory provide virtual, team-based autoimmune care that combines clinicians, nutrition experts, and ongoing symptom tracking rather than isolated specialist visits. By partnering directly with employers and health plans, they frame autoimmune disease not just as a clinical issue but as a major driver of absenteeism, disability claims, and healthcare spending.

At the data layer, organizations such as ViuHealth are building large longitudinal datasets designed to improve research and treatment development for populations historically underrepresented in clinical evidence.

Notice the shift: these companies aren’t selling “better patient experience.”

They’re demonstrating measurable outcomes — fewer disease flares, reduced emergency utilization, and lower total cost of care. That’s what allows complex chronic care to finally scale within existing payment systems.

Heart disease remains the number one cause of death for women — yet it often enters the healthcare system disguised as something else.

Women are more likely to present with non-classic cardiac symptoms such as fatigue, nausea, or shortness of breath rather than crushing chest pain. They are more likely to be misdiagnosed, discharged, or diagnosed later in disease progression. Even after diagnosis, women are less likely to receive guideline-recommended therapies or cardiac rehabilitation.

Again, this isn’t solely about clinician bias.

Much of cardiovascular evidence was historically built using male-dominant clinical trial populations. Risk calculators frequently underweight factors highly relevant to women, including pregnancy complications, autoimmune disease history, or hormonal transitions.

When diagnostic tools are calibrated around incomplete data, underdiagnosis becomes predictable — not accidental.

Women-focused cardiovascular innovators are beginning to redesign prevention and detection itself.

Companies like Hello Heart use connected monitoring, behavioral coaching, and personalized risk analytics — often delivered through employer benefits — to identify and manage cardiovascular risk earlier rather than waiting for acute cardiac events.

Meanwhile, Bloomer Tech is developing wearable diagnostics built specifically around female physiology, enabling continuous monitoring that may capture cardiovascular signals missed in traditional screening environments.

Their positioning is notably pragmatic:

Not a women’s wellness initiative —
but prevention of costly hospitalizations in a massively underdiagnosed population.

That economic framing is what allows women-centered cardiology models to gain adoption with payers and employers.

Autoimmune disease and women’s heart disease look like clinical problems.

But they are fundamentally system design problems.

Research incentives shape evidence.
Reimbursement shapes diagnosis.
Benefit design shapes access to care.

When those upstream systems fail to account for women’s biology and disease patterns, underdiagnosis becomes the expected outcome.

The encouraging shift is that innovators across care delivery, data infrastructure, and employer health are beginning to rebuild these systems — creating entirely new models of care in the process.

And with them, entirely new career paths across women’s health.

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Dr. Yael Katz is the founder and CEO of Simbryo Technologies, a Covington, Kentucky-based biotech startup founded in 2023 that develops endometrial organoid technology to improve IVF success rates. A Princeton-trained neuroscientist, Katz is advancing personalized reproductive medicine by creating patient-specific models to optimize fertility treatments.

Simbryo Technologies is a commercial-stage biotech company accelerating paths to pregnancy via organoid medicine and AI. Working with top research institutions and fertility clinics, Simbryo develops personalized diagnostic platforms that predict and optimize endometrial fertility, giving patients and physicians actionable insights to increase success rates and providing a powerful in-vitro test bed for novel fertility treatments.

📌 Director of Marketing

Priyanka Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Evvy, a women’s health startup focused on closing the gender health gap by advancing research on the vaginal microbiome. A Stanford graduate and former Head of Product at pymetrics, Jain has built her career at the intersection of data science, technology, and healthcare. She founded Evvy to address the lack of research and diagnostics in women’s health.

Evvy is unlocking precision women’s healthcare through novel, overlooked female biomarkers — starting with the vaginal microbiome.Backed by leading healthcare investors, the Evvy team includes leading OB/GYNs and vaginal microbiome researchers with decades of experience at organizations like UCSF, Stanford, Harvard, Cleveland Clinic, and more. Evvy is one of the fastest growing women’s health companies in the US

📌 Senior Software Engineer

Pete Anevski is the Chief Executive Officer of Progyny, a leading provider of fertility and women’s health benefits for employers. At Progyny, he focuses on expanding access to fertility, family-building, and broader women’s health services through employer-sponsored benefits, using data-driven care models to improve outcomes for patients while helping companies better support their employees.

Progyny is a women’s health and fertility benefits company that partners with employers and health plans to provide comprehensive coverage for fertility, family building, and reproductive health services. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in New York, Progyny helps employees access treatments such as IVF, egg freezing, and other fertility care through employer-sponsored benefits.

📌 Director, Social Media

Note: This newsletter is for informational purposes only. For any legal questions or issues, please consult outside legal counsel. Any opinions expressed in this newsletter are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. I cannot guarantee the credibility of the sources or job listings I share. It's advisable to do your own research before engaging with them.

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