👩🏽🔬 Repro Grants Launches to Speed up Funding for Female Reproductive Science
FemWealth Springboard
Meet Sara Kemppainen, Women’s Health Research Advocate and Leader of Repro Grants, a Fifty Years initiative
Women’s health has long been underfunded and underresearched, with enormous repercussions on the life quality of half the world’s population!
Sara Kemppainen, a Founder in Residence at Fifty Years and lead of the firm’s new Repro Grants initiative, is on a mission to change that by accelerating women’s reproductive health research. Originally from Finland, she joined the San Francisco-based early-stage VC firm in January of this year to find and support the best early-stage teams in reproductive health.
“How is it possible that it’s 2022, and we don’t know what period is? AND how is one supposed to build fast-growing companies that the VC model requires if our deeptech femtech companies are forced to do basic science research?” - Sara Kemppainen
After talking to over 100 entrepreneurs and scientists, she realized that what limits rapid progress in femtech is not the lack of consumer demand or investor excitement but a gap in early-stage science. Determined to change the status quo, the Fifty Years team agreed to start Repro Grants, a fast funding initiative for female reproductive science.
Read our Deep Dive Q&A
What is “Repro Grants”?
Sara: Repro Grants is a new grantmaking body exclusively focused on supporting female reproductive health research. Inspired by Impetus and Fast Grants - who pioneered the approach of quickly providing grants for scientists in a specific area of research, the application process optimizes for speed. It takes 30 minutes to complete, and applicants get a decision within 21 days.
The applications for Round 1 open today! In the next month, scientific reviewers will award $25-100K to approximately 10 high-risk, high-reward research projects with the hope of addressing health inequalities.
What is your mission, and what determined you to take on it?
Sara: We’re on a mission to accelerate female reproductive science and bridge the enormous gender research gap that exists today.
When it comes to studying female bodies, we’re embarrassingly late. After all, it was only in 1993 that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the main science funding body in the US, mandated that clinical trials should be run on both men and women. Before that, the male body was the “medical norm,” with almost all medical research, including drug and diagnostic development, conducted exclusively on male bodies. In 2016, the NIH revised its research policy to include female mice in pre-clinical settings, which is the backbone of basic research.
I cannot overstate the importance of this policy update. It’s only in the last 6 years that researchers started considering the female body when developing biological theory.
How did you identify the problem you’re trying to solve?
Sara: I joined Fifty Years as a Founder in Residence in January with the mission to find and support the best early-stage teams in reproductive health. After talking to over 100 entrepreneurs and scientists, it became glaringly obvious that it’s not the lack of consumer demand or investor excitement that limits rapid progress in femtech but a gap in early-stage science.
I specifically remember one time when I was talking to a startup working on a product in relation to menstrual blood. But instead of iterating on that product, they had to spend a significant portion of their runaway trying to understand the exact biochemistry of menstrual blood.
That was mindboggling and shocking. A person that menstruates spends, on average, 7 years on their period. How is it possible that it’s 2022, and we don’t know what period is? AND how is one supposed to build fast-growing companies that the VC model requires if our deeptech femtech companies are forced to do basic science research?
Who are the scientific reviewers you work with?
Sara: First off, we couldn’t do this program without our scientific reviewers. We’re extremely fortunate to have support from leading scientists and clinicians such as Berna Sozen (Yale University), Bérénice Benayoun (USC), and Kara Goldman (Northwestern).
What are the priorities in the women’s health space? What type of research will you fund?
Sara: It’s hard to prioritize in a field that has so many fascinating areas of research relatively untouched. But we’re hoping to fund a broad range of research, from menstrual health to endocrine disorders, female pleasure and sexual dysfunctions, menopause, and maternal health.
We also recognize there’s tons of interdisciplinary research to be done, for example, at the intersection of reproductive and mental health. For example, mood changes are one of the most common side-effects of birth control, but we haven’t comprehensively studied the long-term impact of hormonal birth control on mental health or how anti-depressants and oral contraceptives interact.
How can we leverage technology to advance women's health research?
Sara: Advances in biological and computational tools, such as cheaper sequencing tools and high-throughput experimentation, have the power to accelerate our scientific knowledge faster and more cost-efficiently than ever before. In the last decade, the cost of next generation sequencing (NGS) has dramatically dropped, eventually outpacing Moore’s Law.
For example, genetic sequencing of discarded embryos could be pivotal in understanding mutation-driven conditions and causes of early pregnancy loss. But, the NIH refuses to fund embryonic research. This is one potential way for us to decode the source of 1 million (per year) miscarriages and alleviate heartache from expecting families, but we’re not taking advantage of it!
“While our guiding mission is to improve the well-being and health of half of the world’s population by bridging the gender research gap, I’m convinced that in the meantime, we’ll end up funding the next Nobel laureate in female reproductive health. “
What makes you hopeful?
Sara: We’re excited to fund the next generation of scientists because where only a few have gone, a lot is left to discover.
When the pioneering (and first Australian female) urologist Helena O’Connel started dissecting female bodies in the late 1990s, she ended up discovering that the clitoris, which until then was understood as a tiny bulb at the top of the vulva, instead was a 10-centimeter long internal structure. The fact that we discovered an organ-like structure within our bodies (only) 20 years ago makes me wonder what we're still left to discover!
While our guiding mission is to improve the well-being and health of half of the world’s population by bridging the gender research gap, I’m convinced that in the meantime, we’ll end up funding the next Nobel laureate in female reproductive health.
How can people get involved and support you?
Sara: You can start by sharing our message! If you'd like to contribute financially1 to our efforts of funding bold, early-stage research in female reproductive health, you can reach me at sara@reprogrants.org. We’re raising up to $3 million in philanthropic donations to fund the first cohort of scientists.
For more information, visit reprogrants.org. Also, follow Sara on Twitter and LinkedIn.
If you are a scientist at an academic institution and working on female reproductive science projects, apply here.
And if you missed the first edition of FemWealth Springboard featuring Ourspace, you can read it here.
Repro Grants is established as a separate non-profit entity under the fiscal sponsorship of the Open Collective Foundation.