U.S. nonprofit Wellcome Leap is partnering with the Melinda French Gates-founded coalition Pivotal, raising $100 million to advance women’s health research in areas with the highest need.
“A woman’s trajectory in life—I believe—really starts with their health,” philanthropist French Gates said Sept. 10 at the 2025 Forbes Power Women’s Summit. “Whatever they want to do, they have to be well.”
“And yet, we don’t invest far enough money into women’s health,” she continued. “We’re going to change that.”
Together, Wellcome Leap and Pivotal will work to advance scientific breakthroughs for women in areas like cardiovascular health, autoimmune disease and mental health.
The new money will bankroll the launch of two programs slated to start in 2026. The three-year initiatives will be designed using Leap’s research model, which is built to be fast, flexible and stretch across indications and countries.
Leap itself is modeled after the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and is helmed by the first woman to ever lead DARPA, Regina Dugan, Ph.D.
“For so long, the research community has treated women as if they're small men. Women are not small men,” Dugan said during the Forbes event.
“And to give you a sense of the gap that that creates, 99% of the studies on the biology of aging do not include a model for menopause,” Dugan said. “Now, how can that be? We're 50% of the population.”
Leap’s ultimate goal is to invest $1 billion in philanthropic capital for breakthroughs in under-researched conditions that disproportionately affect women, with the new $100 million bringing the nonprofit’s investment so far to $250 million.
The already-invested $150 million has fueled three programs: one focused on reducing the rate of stillbirths, another aimed at halving a woman’s lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s disease and the third setting out to reduce the average diagnosis and treatment time for heavy menstrual bleeding.
“These are problems that we have to solve,” Dugan said. “What we have are not minor gaps in our knowledge—we have chasms in our knowledge that have been created and perpetuated by decades of underinvestment in research.”
Excluding cancer, only 1% of all global health research funds were allocated to women’s health conditions in 2020, a fact the organizations underscored in a Sept. 10 release. The partners called closing the women’s health gap “both a moral and an economic imperative,” citing the potential to add more than $1 trillion to the global economy each year by 2040.
“We need to look at this broken status quo through new eyes and stop tolerating women’s pain and suffering,” French Gates said in the release.
The philanthropist founded Pivotal in 2015 in efforts to expand women’s power and influence. Last year, Pivotal Ventures launched a $250 million fund that is working with nonprofit organizations worldwide to improve women’s mental and physical health.