《经济学人》双语：女性健康科技公司发展热潮

时间：2023-05-20

Para2&3数据与初创公司：据估计到2027年，从去年的225亿美元增至650亿美元以上

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《经济学人》双语：女性健康科技公司发展热潮

文/Irene-自由英语之路

【本篇内容简述】

【Para1】引入：从奥运会七项全能冠军杰西卡讲起，松弛素使新妈妈更容易受伤，现在她创办了Jennis女性健身APP，刚刚结束一轮融资。

【Para2&3】数据与初创公司：据估计到2027年，从去年的225亿美元增至650亿美元以上。目前全球仅投资了140亿美元，这是资本的机会。举例了5个例子：德国拜耳公司，比尔盖茨投资的公司，美国初创企业Maven Clinic，英国公司Elvie。

【Para4&5】男女健康市场：关注女性健康的群体多，市场更大。男性健康更常被研究，没有考虑女性的独特性。

【Para6&7】女性健康科技：英国大冶公司添加大麻二酚的卫生棉条；Hertitle健康公司提供无创检测9种妇科疾病；Elvie公司的无声可穿戴式吸奶器。

【Para8】结尾：太多的女性健康科技公司面临着一场艰苦的斗争，有的公司倒闭。所有女性在某些时候都需要妇科帮助。

标题：

Health technology

Girls uninterrupted

Femtech firms are enjoying an investment boom. About time

健康科技

女性不受打扰

女性健康科技公司正处于投资热潮。是时候了

Paragraph 1：

A HORMONE CALLED relaxin helps loosen up pregnant women’s hips. Without it, the pain of delivery would be unbearable.

一种叫做松弛素的激素可以帮助孕妇放松臀部。没有它，分娩的痛苦将无法忍受。

Its job done, however, relaxin lingers in female bodies for up to a year, when softer ligaments make new mothers more prone to injury, as Jessica Ennis-Hill, an Olympic champion heptathlete, discovered in training after giving birth in 2014.

然而，正如奥运会七项全能冠军杰西卡·恩尼斯·希尔在2014年分娩后的训练中所发现的那样，松弛素在女性体内滞留长达一年之久，此时较软的韧带使新妈妈更容易受伤。

Five years later Dame Jessica started Jennis, a fitness app to help other women perform safe post-natal workouts.

五年后，杰西卡女士创办了Jennis，一款帮助女性进行产后安全锻炼的健身应用程序。

It now lets users optimise workouts for the different phases of their menstrual cycles, and has just concluded a successful funding round.

现在，它帮助用户针对经期的不同阶段进行优化训练，并且刚刚结束了一轮成功的融资。

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Dame Jessica’s startup is part of a wave of “femtech” firms coming up with ways for women to overcome health problems specific to their sex.

杰西卡女士的初创公司是“女性科技”公司浪潮的一部分，这些公司为女性提供了克服特定性别健康问题的方法。

The market could more than double from $22.5bn last year to more than $65bn by 2027, reckons Global Market Insights, a research firm.

研究公司环球通视估计，到2027年，该市场可能会翻一番以上，从去年的225亿美元增至650亿美元以上。

Having ignored it for years—in 2020 femtech received only 3% of all health-tech funding, and a modest $14bn has been invested in it globally to date —venture capitalists are at last waking up to the opportunity.

在2020年多年忽视了这一点，女性科技公司只获得了所有医疗科技资金的3%，迄今为止，全球范围内仅投资了140亿美元——风险资本家们终于意识到了这一机会。

So far this year they have invested nearly $1.2bn in the industry, nearly half as much again as the annual record in 2019 (see chart 1).

今年迄今为止，他们已在该行业投资了近12亿美元，几乎增长了2019年全年记录的一半（见表1）。

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Last year Bayer, a big German drugmaker, paid $425m to buy KaNDy, a British developer of a non-hormonal treatment for menopause symptoms, and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s billionaire co-founder, backed BIOMILQ, a startup that has produced cell-cultured human breast milk and aims to bring both parents closer to their newborns.

去年，德国大型制药商拜耳斥资4.25亿美元收购了英国一家针对更年期症状的非激素疗法开发商KaNDy；微软的亿万富翁联合创始人比尔·盖茨资助了BIOMILQ，这是一家生产细胞培养母乳的初创公司，旨在让父母双方更接近新生儿，

In August Maven Clinic, an American startup which began as a femtech but has expanded to other areas of health, raised $110m and achieved “unicorn” status, with a valuation of more than $1bn.

8月，美国初创企业Maven Clinic筹集了1.1亿美元资金，获得了“独角兽”地位，估值超过10亿美元。Maven Clinic最初是一家女性科技公司，但现在已经扩展到其他医疗领域。

In September Elvie, another British firm, raised $97m from venture-capital firms.

9月，另一家英国公司Elvie从风险投资公司筹集了9700万美元。

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Unlike heath tech aimed at men, which often focuses on erectile dysfunction, a condition that afflicts perhaps one in ten potential users, femtech offers products like period trackers, which could be of value to virtually all of the world’s 4bn women at some point in their lives.

男性健康科技通常关注性功能障碍，而此功能障碍可能只困扰着十分之一的潜在用户，而女性健康不同，主要提供的产品如经期跟踪器，在世界上40亿女性的生活中的某个时刻，几乎对所有女性都有价值。

Moreover, women are 75% likelier than men to adopt digital tools for health care. That makes for a huge potential market.

此外，女性比男性更有75%的可能采用数字工具来帮助女性或者医疗保健。这就形成了一个巨大的潜在市场。

Paragraph 5:

A big reason femtech has been slow to grow has to do with the underlying medical science.

女性健康科技增长缓慢的一个重要原因与基础医学有关。

For conditions that affect all humans, men are more commonly studied, largely owing to misplaced worries that women’s hormonal fluctuations can confound results (male mice are favoured for the same reason).

对于影响所有人类的疾病，男性更常被研究，这主要是因为人们错误地担心女性荷尔蒙的波动会混淆结果（出于同样的原因，雄性老鼠更受青睐）

In the few more inclusive studies, results are seldom disaggregated by sex, obscuring how diseases—and the drugs used to treat them—affect women differently.

在为数不多的几项更具包容性的研究中，结果很少按性别分类，模糊了疾病和用于治疗疾病的药物对女性的不同影响。

“We have been operating as if women are just smaller versions of men,” observes Alisa Vitti, a hormone expert whose work on the 29-day “infradian” body clock, which affects everything from metabolism to sensitivity to pain and is a uniquely female phenomenon, underpins many period trackers.

“我们一直在研究，就好像女性只是男性的小版本，”激素专家艾丽莎·维蒂观察道，她在研究为期29天的“月周节律”工作生物钟，这影响了新陈代谢到对疼痛的敏感性，这是一种独特的女性现象，是许多经期追踪者的基础。

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As a result, plenty of woman-specific health issues have, despite their ubiquity, been routinely neglected. Femtechs help fill this research gap.

因此，许多针对女性的健康问题尽管普遍存在，却经常被忽视。女性健康科技帮助填补了这一研究空白。

Noting that eight in ten women suffer from premenstrual pain but no treatments have been specifically designed to allay it, founders of Daye, a British startup, designed a tampon laced with cannabidiol, after observing that the vaginal canal has more cannabinoid receptors than any other part of the female body.

注意到十分之八的女性患有经前疼痛，但没有专门设计治疗方法来缓解疼痛。英国初创企业大冶的创始人在观察到阴道比女性身体的任何其他部位都有更多的大麻素受体后，设计了一种添加大麻二酚的卫生棉条。

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Hertility Health, also of Britain, offers non-invasive tests which can help diagnose nine common gynaecological conditions.

同样来自英国的Hertitle健康公司提供无创检测，可以帮助诊断九种常见的妇科疾病。

Elvie’s silent wearable breast pump is a best-seller in America and Britain; its app-controlled pelvic-floor trainer reduces the chances of the typical intervention, whereby surgeons insert “a fishing net and lift up your pelvic organs because they are falling out of your vagina”, says Tania Boler, the firm’s founder.

Elvie的无声可穿戴式吸奶器在美国和英国都很畅销；其应用程序控制了盆底训练器。该公司创始人塔尼亚·博勒说：“一张渔网，提起你的盆腔器官，因为它们正在脱落。”

Paragraph 8:

Labour pains

阵痛

That is welcome progress. But too many femtechs face an uphill struggle.

这是一个可喜的进步。但太多的女性健康科技公司面临着一场艰苦的斗争。

Helen O’Neill, who runs Hertility Health, calls the $5.7m funding round her firm closed in June a “soul-destroying” process.

Hertibility健康的负责人海伦·奥尼尔称，她在获得的570万美元资金，公司6月份关闭了，这是一个“毁灭灵魂”的过程。

“It was predominantly grey-haired men saying they are not sure there is a market for this,” she says.

她说：“主要是白发男性说，他们不确定这是否有市场。”

Never mind that all women with a reproductive system require gynaecological help at some point.

记住，所有有生殖系统的女性在某些时候都需要妇科帮助。