Femtech Canada urging government to invest $100 million to advance women’s health and innovation

Femtech Canada — a national organization of SMEs focused on advancing innovation, research and equity — is petitioning the federal government to invest $100 million in its 2025 budget to improve women’s health and accelerate innovation nationwide.

“With women’s health being severely underfunded, underserved, underresearched, and undertreated, this funding call represents the ability to put Canada on the map as a leader in women’s health and bring innovative solutions to the table that can solve centuries-old challenges faced by 50 per cent of [the country’s] population,” Rachel Bartholomew, founder of Femtech Canada, told Vancouver Tech Journal.

In a proposal, the organization recommended that the funding go toward initiatives that address the gaps in research, diagnosis, care delivery, and support. The letter highlights a number of challenges facing developments in women's healthcare:

• Canada is decades behind in medical research and data, as it wasn’t until 1997 that the government recommended women be included in clinical trials. Despite this, trial participants have remained predominantly male.

• Women face many barriers in accessing healthcare in Canada from a range of factors. While many have responded by developing solutions, less than six per cent of funded grants are allocated toward female-specific health research. In addition, female founders only receive an estimated four per cent of VC funding.

• Critical conditions such as endometriosis and female-specific symptoms of cardiovascular diseases are often underdiagnosed. This has affected women’s productivity and ability to stay or advance in the workforce, contributing to an estimated $27 billion loss in Canada’s GDP.

To address these issues, Femtech Canada advised investing $20 million in women’s health research and strengthening data standards, $30 million in a national femtech accelerator that leverages regional programs, and $50 million in early-stage femtech startups. It also encouraged creating a BDC fund that doesn’t exclude startups in the initial stages of development, or that are pre-revenue.

Femtech Canada believes that this approach could generate 1,000 jobs, 150 companies, and 100 innovations, leading to improved societal and health outcomes, affordability and accessibility of care, and growth of the female workforce. 

Vancouver founders advancing women’s healthcare

Lanna Last, founder of Aima — which offers tested CBD and CBG products for pelvic discomfort — said her company has been “severely blocked by Health Canada in innovating alternative solutions to managing pain” due to the lack of attention to female-specific conditions.

“Canada's archaic view of cannabis — non-psychoactive cannabinoids specifically — has damaged not only the industry and scientific research emerging, but the research [on] women's health,” said the entrepreneur. “As a company, we've had to pivot to the U.S., working in major research hospitals [that] understand the science.”

Last shared that when it came to research and development, she had to start from scratch to build databases, because of the lack of studies on women. Commercializing was also difficult since Aima had to educate stakeholders about the importance of investing in women’s health. When scaling, the company encountered further hurdles, as it required specialized infrastructure and partnerships to deliver solutions effectively.

Dr. Alexandra Greenhill, co-founder of Careteam, a platform that enables virtual care coordination and collaboration between health organizations, said there’s very little funding outside of the government’s CAN Health initiative to help startups scale — resulting in losing “our best companies.”

“We now have a platform that has helped over 18,000 patients across 23 conditions and proven to make sense on clinical, technical, and economics. Yet, because it's innovative, there are no set-up line budgets in healthcare organizations’ budgets to adopt,” the physician shared with Vancouver Tech Journal. “It reminds me of doing telehealth in 2012 when there were no fees. It took the pandemic to get this funded.”

Greenhill highlighted that because investors typically fund what they know and understand, and that only around 15 per cent of VC partners are female, there’s overall less interest towards women’s health.

“While everyone agrees we need to push on greater DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], and there have been a lot of efforts, progress there has been rather slow over the last two decades,” she said. “So in parallel, we need support from governments to remedy the situation in the meantime and fund the growth of this much-needed sector of health innovation. This is consistent with the government's own stance, the Gender-based Analysis Plus.”

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