2025 FemTech Conference

This year, Imperial College Femtech Society hosted their annual Femtech conference on Saturday, 22th February with the theme: ‘Bridging Innovation & Accessibility in Femtech’. 

The whole-day event inside the City and Guilds Building consisted of a range of speakers and start-up companies advocating for women’s health, including founders of companies and non-profit organisations, researchers, strategists, and a general practitioner. The speaker choices were well-selected overall, with diversity in careers, opinions, and outlook onto the Femtech field. We noted key moments from speakers and panelists, insightful interviews with Dr. Sioned Jones and Kathrin Folkendt, as well as highlights from the start-up fair.  

Key speakers and panel discussion 

Dr Helen O’Neil is an associate professor in reproductive and Molecular Genetics at UCL and the founder of Hertility, an innovative women’s health company renowned for its unique at-home diagnostic tests and comprehensive gynecological care. She has dedicated over 17 years of research into fertility and women’s health. Since there are so many different causes of female infertility, a large amount of data is required. Age is considered the main factor, but genetic and lifestyle factors are also essential understanding someone’s pathology. Hertility produces person-facing results, with reference ranges built on real, propreitary data, producing a predictive AI model that acts as a 98% accurate diagnostic tool for 18 conditions. This has the potential to reduce diagnosis, thus treatment times, of these conditions by months, considering data longitudinally from menstruation to menopause.  

Tori Ford is a health researcher currently studying Primary Health Care at the University of Oxford and is the founder of Medical Herstory, an award-winning non-profit storytelling platform that aims to tackle medical sexism and stigma by allowing people to share their health experiences and improve patient advocacy. 80% of women in the UK feel healthcare professionals have not listened to them; this dismissiveness can be attributed to systemic ignorance of women’s bodies, creating a trust gap between healthcare practitioners and women’s account of their own bodies. Tori shared her personal experience with chronic vulval pain, sparking conversations with friends about their patient experiences and tolerance of long-term pain, which led to the innovation of this platform, embracing the power of patient perspective – “people are the experts of their own experience and their own bodies.” 

The panel discussion, comprised of Kathrin Folkendt, Dr. Sharon Dixon, Dr. Melis Ada Ekinci, Dr. Ada Humphrey and Dr. Rumbi Muntega, highlighted the importance of listening to women, the value of collaboration and staying true to the mission of improving women’s health – “we all have a sphere of influence”, as Dr Muntega stated. Topics such as the accessibility paradox of rapidly developing technology being difficult to reach for everyone, roadblocks preventing current healthcare systems embrace Femtech solutions, expanding female care to beyond just reproductive health, and prioritising medical impact over marketability, were all dissected. The insightful conversation underscored the importance of diversity, from investment panels that are informed about female health, to including underrepresented groups in research. Introducing women’s health institutes at universities and women’s health grants, improving health economic data through Femtech solutions, and structuring companies to intrinsically value family support instead of the perk-based system, all were suggested solutions that are yet to be fully embraced.  

Interview with speaker Dr. Sioned Jones 

Dr. Sioned Jones is the co-founder of BoobyBiome, a health tech start-up focusing on using the breast milk microbiome to revolutionise infant health. She was awarded the 2023 Potts Medal and listed on the 2024 Forbes 30 under 30 list.  

Q. How have you navigated useful findings in the recently developing microbiome field for insight into your own company? 

The Human Microbiome Project, which was a multi-billion-dollar project established between different institutions and a global effort to characterise the microbiome in our body. The study looked at our guts, skin, and various components of the body, but sadly not at breast milk. This is yet another example of women’s health, maternal health in particular, being overlooked. When we started BoobyBiome, people had a very good understanding of the species present in breast milk – but what was missing was strain resolution. This is why, back in 2019, we started building what is now the world’s first shotgun metagenomic database of the breast milk microbiome, which further gives us insight into the functional elements of the strains. Recent developments in sequencing, building libraries, and bioinformatics convey a very good foundation needed for us to build a pipeline that can help identify relevant strains in breast milk for infant development.   

Q. What are your thoughts on the long-term personalisation of breastfeeding in the context of the microbiome? How do you imagine your company getting there and what challenges do you expect to face? 

Our microbiome is completely personalised to who we are. However, we need to have a very good dataset to know what is in the breast milk microbiome before we can start to personalise it. For example, if a baby is born by C-section, it will have a different microbiome compared to a baby that is born vaginally. How do factors like antibiotics, geography, and diets, all play a role into this? To answer this question, we are collecting metadata from our donors to understand how these affect the breast milk microbiome. As we continue to build this rich database, the future is being able to create tailored solutions for everyone. Imagine a world where you can send a sample of your breast milk and infant stool sample, which we can compare to our database for personalised substitution. Currently, we are focussing on the first 6 months of life, which we believe to be the early critical window to ensure correct bacterial seeding. We believe it is crucial to have tailored products for each of these developmental stages. 

Interview with speaker Kathrin Folkendt 

Kathrin is the founder and CEO of Femtech Insider, now the globally leading platform for women’s health innovation and media. She is a leading strategist and thought leader in women’s health innovation with a background in Finance. He company covers innovation space, diagnostic and many types of industry. 

Q. What is one of the cutting-edge women’s health tech innovations you are exposed to as a CEO of a news company that you are particularly excited about? 

There are some exciting recent developments in Biotech and medtech areas, both on diagnostic and care side. These include for conditions like PCOS as well as ovarian health and biology. Right now, the ovary is not very well understood. It is a control centre for lots of hormones and if we understand more about it, we could extend the reproductive lives of women, push back menopause, and perhaps understand more about PCOS and endometriosis, conditions that impact many women. There is also a lot of promising innovation in the fertility sector. Innovation around financial accessibility, automation, and optimisation to bring the cost down and improve access. 

Q. You’ve shared how you found out about your PCOS diagnosis despite growing up in a good healthcare system. How can PCOS be prevented, especially through more rigorous screening procedures even in these developed systems? 

PCOS is difficult to diagnose as there are patients with many kinds of PCOS that have different symptoms. Screening procedures can be made more rigorous starting by creating awareness of the condition overall so women might identify their symptoms sooner. There should also be more healthcare literacy for women and the carers and providers should have a better understanding of women’s health. 

Q. How do you and your company filter misinformation and combat limitations in previous research in this industry while writing news?  

We often send information off to medical advisors to scrutinise the information and find any instances of misinformation. Sometimes I can evaluate information, but I will also send it to specialists in the field to ask if it is sound. There have been instances of this in the past due to influencers increasingly advertising supplements and workout programmes; sometimes excess advertisement can potentially harm women instead of helping them. 

Start-up fair 

The start-up fair was located in the Breakout space of the City and Guilds Building during lunch time, featuring fourteen start-up companies. This included several companies founded by some of the speakers, like BoobyBiome, Woost Health, Medical Herstory, and Hertility. One of the products that stood out was Nettle, an award-winning brain simulation device for menstrual pain and PMS developed by Samphire Neuroscience. Our other favourite product was the proprietary device from BoobyBiome, which is a patented oxygen-reducing device integrated to any breast milk bottle tested to improve shelf-life.  

During the fair, we asked some of the students their opinions on the conference and the fair. Some people commented that a few of the companies had relatively little scientific background to their ideas, where their products – often wellbeing apps – were simply methods of tracking your health. Others mentioned that they would definitely return to the conference next year.  

Overall, the breadth and diversity of the speakers’ academic backgrounds and current focus was impressive and enjoyable to see. However, this diversity meant that not all of the speakers nor panelists were thoroughly connected to each other, sometimes feeling disjointed. This may have led to a less focused discussion on connecting innovation with accessibility. Nevertheless, the conference was an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in women’s health to network and experience not only the innovative potential but also challenges in the field from a wide range of perspectives.