(Newswire.net — June 10, 2022) —
Evvy is a vaginal microbiome testing brand that’s breaking down health care barriers with its cutting-edge Equal Research Day debuting on June 10, 2022. Evvy’s co-founders, Priyanka Jain and Laine Bruzek, recently penned an op-ed for Fortune about its groundbreaking efforts.
Evvy has been sharing its Equal Research Day initiative on its Instagram, @Evvy, with posts and stories highlighting the shocking data that women weren’t included in U.S. clinical research until June 10, 1993 when Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act. That was largely what inspired Jain and Bruzek to launch Equal Research Day.
“We have such a lack of understanding of what health and disease looks like in the female body,” Jain says. “We are trying to shed light on the research that needs to be done to enable the healthcare system to better predict risk, diagnose, and treat disease as it uniquely manifests in women and people with vaginas.”
In July 2021, Evvy launched the first-ever at-home vaginal microbiome test to leverage metagenomic sequencing. The fast, at-home test involves a swab of the vagina, then test-takers send the results to a lab. A comprehensive report of the data found in the swab is sent to the patient within two to three weeks.
Evvy Enters New Era of Inclusive Research
The duo sees Equal Research Day as not only paying tribute to the first law requiring clinical research to include female bodies, but as a day to promote more research, encourage women to share their stories, and finally abandon the research theory that male bodies are the standard on which we base medical research.
Jain and Bruzek add that to understand why women have been excluded from clinical research, it’s crucial to learn about the road that led women to be left out of such scientific breakthroughs.
Jain and Bruzek explain that excluding “women of childbearing age” from research was partially a safety issue when thalidomide was used in the 1950s to treat morning sickness in pregnant women and unintentionally caused grave birth defects. As a result, Jain and Bruzek says all women were omitted from medical research studies, even women on birth control, lesbians, single women, and women with a male partner who had undergone a vasectomy.
Evvy Acknowledges All Health Care Has Not Been Created Equal
With women being diagnosed, on average, four years later than men across over 700 different diseases, Evvy’s team believes equal medical research is long overdue. They’re powering the research needed to close the gender health gap by discovering how female biomarkers can be better leveraged to predict risk, diagnose, and treat complex health conditions in the female body.
Jain and Bruzek are proud to be one of the companies spearheading the femtech (software and tech companies addressing women’s health care needs) boom. By 2027, Evvy’s team says the progressive industry is slated to exceed $60 billion worldwide by 2027.
With more than 200 startups in the femtech space, Jain and Bruzek say 92% of those brands are led by women. “We founded the company to discover and leverage female-specific biomarkers, starting with the vaginal microbiome,” Evvy’s co-founders say. “Femtech accounts for only 1.4% of health care investments and only 3.3% of digital health funding. Femtech can create real solutions for over 50% of the world’s population and it’s time for the venture industry to start treating it that way.”
In additional efforts to boost Equal Research Day’s reach, Evvy has launched a line of tote bags, baseball caps, stickers, and a poster with all proceeds benefiting the Society For Women’s Health Research.
Both Jain and Bruzek agree that investing in research on the female body is vital.
Evvy’s team came across a 2021 federally funded study that found that double the funding goes to male-prevalent diseases such as HIV/AIDs, prostate cancer, and hepatitis compared to female-prevalent diseases such as migraines, eating disorders, and uterine cancer.
“All people deserve equitable health care,” Bruzek says. “I believe the future of medicine is based on precise and holistic health care and I think that we can’t do that unless we truly understand what health looks like in the female body.”