Physician-scientist Basmah Safdar, MD, has long viewed—and practiced—women’s health as precision medicine. Every cell has a sex. Accordingly, a precision health perspective demonstrates that there are fundamental differences between men and women in almost every health and disease that dictate clinical care. Inadequate sex-specific data drives healthcare inefficiencies and higher costs due to missed or delayed diagnosis and less effective treatments. As director of Women’s Health Research at Yale, Safdar argues that women’s health is precision medicine’s unfinished business in a new Comment for The Lancet.
“The time for women’s health is here. Reframing women’s health through a rigorous, biology-based framework corrects a healthcare system built on incomplete science and missed opportunities,” writes Safdar
We spoke with Safdar about what precision health requires and what it will take to create meaningful change and improve the lives of women and men alike
In the Comment, you outline a new framework for women’s health–centered in systemic science, organizational change, and new funding structures. Why are those three pillars essential to progress?
Basmah Safdar, MD: I believe that women’s health needs to be viewed through the lens of precision medicine – meaning offering a curated, individual-focused, and biology-informed sex-based approach to diagnostics, prognostics and therapeutics. Without such an approach informing routine clinical practice, women will continue to face delays, misdiagnoses, incorrect treatment, and a 25% poorer quality of life than men despite longer life expectancies. As an emergency physician, I have the opportunity to treat patients with this lens on the front lines— for example, by choosing the right diagnostic workup so that an acute life threatening condition such as angina or stroke isn’t dismissed in a woman simply because she explains her symptoms differently, or calibrating dosages of medications to account for the real physiological difference in how a woman metabolizes medications as compared to a man.
If we want to improve health and improve health care delivery, we must take a precision-based approach to women’s health. This perspective benefits both women’s and men’s health, and societal health overall. It means taking our research into sex differences deeper and encouraging science beyond sex-stratified analyses to embrace multisystem complexities across the lifespan, fully leveraging interdisciplinary insight that academia offers for a more holistic lens beyond traditional expertise offered in medicine around organs and specialties as well as opening the funding aperture to include new models to better support the 51% population that makes 80% of household healthcare decisions and control majority of consumer spending.
When it comes to organizational change, you highlight KINETIC. Can you share more with our readers?
Safdar:KINETIC is a one-year experiment—convening interdisciplinary hubs around biology-centric topics that engage Yale expertise across disciplines and life stages. We conceived KINETIC to draw on the full strength of Women’s Health Research at Yale Collaborative spanning more than 40 departments, to bring their collective expertise, clinical depth, and institutional resources to meet the complexity of female biology and generate solutions that are scientifically rigorous and translatable to patient care.
For our first pilot, we have convened KINETIC: Aging & Longevity, intended to accelerate discovery related to aging in women’s health through the lens of midlife and the menopause transition. I’m grateful to Lubna Pal, MD, who has agreed to Co-Chair this first KINETIC with me. If successful, we’ll launch more KINETIC cohorts on additional topics crucial to improving health
In order to accelerate discovery, you are calling for investment at both ends of the innovation pipeline – including standardizing a ‘reverse pitch’ model. Why?
Safdar:Traditionally, academia and industry have functioned through a sequential push-based model: Federal agencies or foundations fund early foundational science, and industry and investors engage downstream as translational and commercial opportunities become better defined. While this approach has powered extraordinary medical breakthroughs in many fields, it places an unusually high persuasion burden on women’s health investigators, who must justify the field’s scientific and commercial relevance at every phase of the translation pipeline. Decades of underinvestment have left an insufficient foundation of basic science female biology.
A “reverse pitch” inverts this dynamic. Instead of pushing science toward the market and hoping funders will follow, it uses a pull approach inviting foundations, industry partners, and investors to bring validated market signals or unmet needs in women’s health early on to an interdisciplinary center like ours where cross-disciplinary teams can coalesce scientific and clinical expertise and resources needed to accelerate solutions. I strongly believe that the “reverse pitch” model reduces market uncertainty from the start, with built-in bridges to translation by design while also shortening commercialization window, meaning evidence-based interventions reach patients more quickly and efficiently.
Importantly, we must consider the blind spots of both models and ensure that today’s momentum translates into tomorrow’s discovery – otherwise, women’s health risks becoming another investment bubble
Can people still join the Women’s Health Research at Yale Collaborative?
Safdar:Absolutely! We welcome anyone from the Yale community—undergraduate through faculty—to join our growing membership. Women’s health is cross-cutting, and we are excited to welcome colleagues from different schools into our Collaborative that serves to fuel our three strategic pillars: fueling discovery, educating the next generation, and accelerating dissemination. It takes perspectives from across Yale disciplines and experiences to move the needle from discovery to impact
