News
The rise in sexual health apps
A rising trend in the wellness sphere is sexual health apps, and there are a variety of technologies aimed specifically at women. Femtech World reports on the latest advances putting pleasure back into women’s hands…
Femtech has made great strides in addressing many female health inequalities, putting women in the driving seat when it comes to matters surrounding menstruation, menopause or fertility.
And now, the focus has shifted onto something a little more wide-ranging: namely, sexual health apps.
As many as 43 per cent of women report suffering from some form of sexual dysfunction in their lifetime.
This manifests itself in such issues as low libido, low confidence, inability to reach orgasm or distressing sexual thoughts, which may in turn have a serious impact on relationships.
Traditional therapy can be expensive and, for some people, talking about such intimate matters with a stranger can be uncomfortable and daunting.
Enter the sexual health app: cost-effective, anonymous and easy to access, it has the potential to revolutionise women’s sexual health.
Blueheart was the brainchild of Sachin Raoul who, following a break-up, found himself in need of sexual therapy he could ill afford financially.
So he, in partnership with world-renowned therapist Dr Katherine Hertlein, set about creating an app that would offer tailored, professional advice in cases of sexual dysfunction.
The app features audio and written sessions, taken from materials designed by Dr Hertlein, focusing around thought, encompassing issues such as sexual fears and anxieties, body, which is centred around building a positive relationships with the body, and connection, which deals with how to communicate.
The app is free, after the team behind it noticed a rise in demand for sexual support over lockdown, and one of the first programmes it offered was designed for women experiencing low libido.
Sachin told Marie Claire magazine: “Today, much of the advice around sex is not necessarily the right advice. Often, support available online is overly focused on ‘wellness’, when a huge range of sexual issues can only be addressed via scientifically-backed support and therapy.
“This is where Blueheart comes in. We’re democratising access to confidential support designed by the world’s leading experts to help people regain control of their sex lives.”
Another science-backed sexual health app is Lover, created by clinical psychologist and behavioural medicine expert Dr Britney Blair and her team.
Like Blueheart, it is described as a science-based app for addressing sexual concerns, increasing pleasure and improving skills in the bedroom through a series of practical exercises, such as orgasm exercises, mindfulness and games, delivered via a mix of audio and video content.
Dr Blair said: “Therapy can change people’s lives. Sexual health is very important and I see relationships changed and lives changed through the work I do [face to face]. Now we have tech as a digital intervention.
“The grand plan is we help people to optimise their sexual life and make sure sex stays alive. Sexual disconnection is a reason couples get divorced.”
Lover has become the first sex therapy app to join the FDA’s Safer Technologies Program, allowing doctors to prescribe it as a safe, side-effect-free treatment for sexual dysfunction.
Ferly bills itself as a sexual mindfulness app, and aims to ‘smash the taboo, the stigma and the shame around women’s health and female pleasure’.
However, in the early days, founders Billie Quinlan and Anna Hushlak found that male investors were reluctant to help them get the idea off the ground, claiming that women were a “niche market” and even recommending that the pair focus on porn to get ahead.
Despite the early stumbling blocks, Ferly was launched in 2019 to offer audio erotic stories, guided practices and personalised programmes, all of which help women explore pleasure in a mindful way and overcome any sexual issues.
The app takes users through a variety of different programmes, which address issues such as lack of body confidence, low libido and difficulty or inability to orgasm.
Billie said: “We use a mindful cognitive behavioural therapy approach. Many sexual issues are because there’s a physiological barrier. You can’t take a pharmaceutical approach… you have to take a holistic approach.”
And despite those investors’ early misgivings, it has since raised more than £1.5m in funding and attracted users from more than 50 countries.
Apps like the above prove, the industry has so much more potential – and women are more than ready to tap into it.
An early PET scan after one cycle of chemotherapy may help predict how aggressive breast cancer responds to treatment, a study suggests.
Research led by The Institute of Cancer Research, London and King’s College London suggests that an early scan taken after one cycle of chemotherapy could help predict how well a patient’s cancer will respond to treatment.
The study focused on patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive form of the disease in which cancer cells lack receptors for the hormones oestrogen and progesterone, as well as the HER2 protein.
Patients with TNBC are usually treated with chemotherapy prior to surgery. While many respond well, residual disease at surgery, typically around six months later, is associated with a significantly poorer prognosis. Identifying people sooner who are unlikely to respond remains a major clinical challenge.
The research explored whether using PET imaging shortly after treatment begins, rather than relying only on MRI scans later in the treatment process, could provide earlier insight into how a patient’s cancer is responding. Twenty-two patients were recruited, with fourteen undergoing FDG-PET scans before treatment and after the first cycle of chemotherapy.
The findings, published in Clinical Cancer Research, showed that changes seen on PET scans after just one cycle of chemotherapy were strongly associated with subsequent response, including whether there was no detectable cancer, known as a complete response, by the end of treatment. Importantly, early PET response showed stronger associations with treatment outcomes than standard mid-treatment MRI scans in this study.
Being able to identify patients who are not responding well at an early stage could allow clinicians to adjust treatment sooner or consider alternative approaches. These findings may also support future strategies to better tailor treatment intensity to individual patients.
The study also compared two types of PET tracers, FDG and FLT, to determine which was most suitable. While both met the study’s technical criteria, FDG-PET was selected for further evaluation due to its better image quality, greater consistency and wider use in clinical practice.
The research also explored how imaging changes after just one cycle of chemotherapy relate to the body’s immune response to treatment. Biopsies taken before and after the first cycle of chemotherapy showed that an increase in immune cells within the tumour was strongly associated with both early PET changes and improved treatment outcomes.
The researchers emphasise that these findings now need to be validated in larger studies. Future work will aim to confirm these results in broader patient groups and explore more accessible imaging approaches, such as ultrasound, alongside PET and MRI.
Sheeba Irshad, professor of cancer immunology at King’s College London and lead of the Breast Cancer Now KCL Research Unit, said:
“In patients who had PET scans both before treatment and after the first cycle, we found that this early scan could predict whether they were likely to achieve a complete response by the end of treatment. These findings highlight the potential of early imaging to guide treatment decisions, and now need to be validated in larger, modern clinical trials.”
Andrew Tutt, professor of breast oncology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said:
“Research that helps us determine early who is already benefitting from standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy and who might benefit from clinical trials to find better treatments is vital. This study shows that FDG-PET may have great value in this regard. We hope to be able to design studies that further investigate and validate these findings.”
The study was supported by funding from King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Breast Cancer Now, Cancer Research UK, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity.
We are excited unveil the three finalists competing for one of the Femtech World Awards’ most coveted honours: the Startup of the Year Award, sponsored by Future Fertility.
This award celebrates an early-stage company making a bold impact in women’s health through innovation, vision and execution.
The winner will be announced at our virtual ceremony on 19 June, with the decision made by a representative from category sponsor Future Fertility.
Congratulations to the shortlist and thank you to everyone who entered or nominated.
Startup of the Year Shortlist
Hello Inside is the first women’s health AI company to turn daily metabolic signals into outcomes women feel and healthcare systems reimburse.
Women’s health has long been under-researched, and current AI benchmarks fail on women’s health questions roughly sixty percent of the time.
Hello Inside built the architecture to close that gap.
Across four years and 12,000+ validated metabolic profiles, three in four women improve at least one symptom within ninety days.
They lose four kilograms in three months, moving from overweight into the healthy range. In a clinical study with Alisa Vitti’s Flo Living, 91.9 per cent reduced PMS burden within sixty days.
U-Ploid is an early-stage biotechnology company tackling one of the most fundamental challenges in fertility care: the sharp, age-related decline in egg quality that limits outcomes across IVF and egg freezing.
While much of the field focuses on improving assessment and selection, U-Ploid is developing a first-in-class therapeutic approach designed to improve egg quality itself by addressing the biological causes of age-related chromosomal errors.
Supported by strong preclinical evidence and now advancing into human studies, U-Ploid combines scientific rigour, regulatory discipline and long-term vision to help redefine what is possible in fertility care.
Gestational diabetes is a strong risk factor for future type 2 diabetes, even in women with normal pre-pregnancy weight, according to a study at the University of Gothenburg.
The researchers call for earlier testing and better follow-up.
“Our results show that gestational diabetes functions as a kind of stress test for the body’s ability to manage blood sugar, and identifies women with a greatly increased risk of future type 2 diabetes”, said Jon Edqvist, PhD and affiliated to research at the University of Gothenburg, and operating room nurse at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
Gestational diabetes is a special type of diabetes that can affect pregnant women.
The condition is defined as elevated blood sugar levels, without previously known diabetes. Treatment involves self-monitoring of blood sugar, advice on lifestyle habits and, if necessary, medication.
Identifying gestational diabetes is important because the disease increases the risk of complications such as preeclampsia, the need for a cesarean section and high birth weight for the baby.
Those who have had gestational diabetes are also at higher risk of later developing type 2 diabetes.
In the current study, published in eClinicalMedicine, researchers now show that gestational diabetes is a strong indicator of future risk of developing type 2 diabetes, even in women with normal weight before pregnancy.
Elevated risk even with normal weight
The study is based on data from the Medical Birth Registry on just over 1.15 million first-time mothers in Sweden, who gave birth between 1987 and 2019. 16,870 women with confirmed gestational diabetes were compared with age-matched women without the diagnosis. The median follow-up period was nine years.
The results show that women with a BMI of 35 and above, i.e. severe obesity, had an almost tenfold increased risk of developing gestational diabetes compared to women with normal weight.
The risk of subsequent type 2 diabetes also increased with higher BMI, but it was significantly increased even with normal weight, which the researchers describe as particularly worrying.
More follow-up and more studies
The researchers behind the study welcome the recently updated recommendations on gestational diabetes in Sweden, where a higher proportion of pregnant women at increased risk are expected to be offered testing earlier in pregnancy, and if necessary, interventions.
“Diagnostics and care of gestational diabetes have looked very different in different parts of the country,” said Annika Rosengren, professor at the University of Gothenburg.
“There is a need for both improved follow-up after gestational diabetes, and more studies that investigate how such follow-up affects future health and prognosis”
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