The Milken Institute is launching a Women’s Health Network chaired by former first lady Jill Biden.
The network will engage research institutions, startups and entrepreneurs, corporations and businesses, investors, payers, policymakers, patient and community organizations, health systems and philanthropists to advance women's health.
They aim to make headway on understanding and treating conditions that disproportionately impact women such as Alzheimer’s disease, menopause, endometriosis and heart disease.
Biden, who has a doctoral degree in education, ran her own women’s health initiative while in the White House and expanded government funding for women’s health research through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health—which former President Joe Biden created—the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. In total, the initiative contributed $1 billion to women’s health research.
The Milken Institute’s new network will be an effort to pool money from the private sector and make up for the historical deficiency in women’s health research. The institute has been convening companies, startups and researchers to understand what the challenges are to the research ecosystem.
“What is unique and different about our interest and focus here, which is really about the private sector stepping up, the private sector providing investment, the provider sector responding to the business case and really helping to finance these companies,” Esther Krofah, executive vice president of Milken Institute Health, said in an interview.
It plans to use the network like a megaphone, she said, to amplify the opportunities to fund women’s health advances and identify problems in the sector. It will also allow researchers and companies to speak to like-minded organizations and the public about their work.
This year, the network will focus on designing a condition-agnostic research fund and setting a target number to raise for the fund. It also wants to fund proof-of-concept projects to help researchers and companies develop evidence for novel treatments.
Another key initiative for the network is to create a digital support platform where organizations can share information on how to do due diligence, prepare for investor conversations or find legal support services, among other needs.
The Women’s Health Network will be focused on action, Krofah said.
Krofah said the network was inspired by the inaugural women’s health research summit at the White House in December. At the summit, Jill Biden committed to support women’s health research beyond her time at the White House.
The Bidens hosted the first White House Conference on Women’s Health Research in partnership with the Milken Institute in December.
“It has been the honor of my life to serve as your first lady and to join you in this work,” the former first lady said at the women's health research summit. “But my work doesn't stop in January, when Joe and I leave this house. I will keep building alliances like the ones that brought us here today, and I will keep pushing for funding for innovative research.”
Though the network will be chaired by the former Democratic first lady, Krofah said it will not have a political slant or aim. Milken has not yet announced who else will join the board, but Krofah said they will be leaders from across the business and political spectrums.
The Milken Institute is nonprofit and nonpartisan, Krofah stressed.
“We are very grateful for Dr. Biden lending her voice, which we think is really important to have,” Krofah said. “Just that incredible platform that she has built over time to say ‘I hear you. I see you. I champion the work that is happening for women.' She has been such a great leader on this topic, and [I’m] so just excited about her being the chair and using her voice and being a spokesperson for the importance of this issue.”
“Women make up half the population, but for far too long, women's health research has been underfunded and has been understudied to close the research gaps and pioneer the next generation of discoveries," Jenny Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council under President Joe Biden, said in December.
Milken has not yet determined whether there will be a fee to join the network, but Krofah said they want to make it as accessible as possible and don’t want cost to be a barrier to joining.
The launch of the network comes amid grant cuts at the National Institutes of Health and funding freezes to Ivy League universities by the Trump administration. Krofah said it is important for the private sector to step up and support women’s health.
“We certainly, like all others in the community, have been tracking and following very closely the actions of the administration and we believe now more than ever is an important time for all parts of the ecosystem to step up … I think the private sector is recognizing that their voice, their dollars, their investment are needed now more than ever before,” she said.