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Health technology -- Girls uninterrupted
健康科技——女孩們前赴后繼
Femtech firms are enjoying an investment boom. About time.
女性科技公司迎來了投資熱潮。是時候了。
A hormone called relaxin helps loosen up pregnant women’s hips.
一種叫做松弛素的荷爾蒙可以幫助孕婦放松臀部。
Without it, the pain of delivery would be unbearable.
沒有它，分娩的痛苦將難以忍受。
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，正如杰西卡·恩尼斯-希爾（奧運會七項全能冠軍）于2014年分娩后在訓練中發現的那樣，松弛素在女性體內會持續起作用長達一年之久，這時較軟的韌帶會使新媽媽們更容易受傷。
Five years later Dame Jessica started Jennis, a fitness app to help other women perform safe post-natal workouts.
五年后，杰西卡女爵士創辦了健身應用軟件Jennis，幫助其他女性進行安全的產后訓練。
It now lets users optimise workouts for the different phases of their menstrual cycles, and has just concluded a successful funding round.
該應用軟件現支持用戶根據月經周期的不同階段優化訓練，并且剛剛成功完成了一輪融資。
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.
杰西卡女爵士的初創公司是“女性科技”公司浪潮中的一員，這些公司想辦法為女性解決這一性別特有的健康問題。
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Global market Insights估計，到2027年，這一市場規模可能會增長一倍以上，從去年的225億美元增長到逾650億美元。
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.
在忽視了女性科技多年之后——2020年，女性科技公司只獲得了所有醫療科技投資的3%，全球對女性科技的投資迄今只有140億美元——風險投資家們終于意識到了這個機會。
So far this year they have invested nearly $1.2bn in the industry, nearly half as much again as the annual record in 2019.
今年到目前為止，他們已在該行業投資近12億美元，幾乎是2019年創下的年度紀錄的一半。
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，德國制藥巨頭拜耳公司斥資4.25億美元收購了英國公司KaNDy，KaNDy研發出了更年期癥狀的非激素療。微軟聯合創始人、億萬富翁比爾·蓋茨投資了初創公司BIOMILQ，該公司生產細胞培養的人類母乳，為了讓父母雙方都能與他們的新生兒更加親近。
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.
今年8月，美國初創企業Maven Clinic融資1.1億美元，達到了“獨角獸”的地位，估值超過10億美元。
In September Elvie, another British firm, raised $97m from venture-capital firms.
Maven Clinic最初是一家女性科技公司，但現已擴展到其他健康領域。9月，另一家英國公司Elvie從風險投資公司融資9700萬美元。
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.
針對男性的健康科技通常專注于勃起功能障礙，這一疾病困擾著大約十分之一的潛在用戶，而與男性健康科技不同，女性科技提供的產品，比如月經追蹤器，可能對世界上40億女性中的幾乎所有人的某個人生階段都有價值。
Moreover, women are 75% likelier than men to adopt digital tools for health care.
此外，女性采用數字醫療工具的可能性比男性高75%。
That makes for a huge potential market.
這就造就了一個巨大的潛在市場。
A big reason femtech has been slow to grow has to do with the underlying medical science.
女性科技發展緩慢的一個重要原因與潛在的醫學事實有關。
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).
對于影響全人類的疾病，針對男性的研究更加普遍，很大程度上是由于錯誤地擔心女性的荷爾蒙波動會影響結果（出于同樣的原因，研究中更常用雄性小鼠來做試驗）。
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.
在少數幾個更具包容性的研究中，研究結果很少按性別分類闡明，模糊了疾病——以及用于治療疾病的藥物——對女性產生的不同影響。
“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.
荷爾蒙專家艾麗莎·維蒂觀察到：“我們現在進行研究的方式就好像女性只是小號的男性。”她有關29日“月節律”生物鐘的研究為許多月經追蹤器提供著理論支撐，這一生物鐘影響從新陳代謝到痛覺敏感性的方方面面，是女性特有的一種現象。
As a result, plenty of woman-specific health issues have, despite their ubiquity, been routinely neglected.
結果就是，盡管許多女性特有的健康問題普遍存在，卻經常被忽視。
Femtechs help fill this research gap.
女性科技公司在幫助填補這一研究空白。
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.
英國初創公司Daye的創始人注意到，80%的女性都遭受著經前疼痛的折磨，但是并沒有專門設計的治療方法用以緩解這種疼痛。該公司注意到女性陰道內的大麻素受體比她們身體的任何其他部位都多，于是設計出了一種含有大麻二酚的衛生棉條。
Hertility Health, also of Britain, offers non-invasive tests which can help diagnose nine common gynaecological conditions.
同樣來自英國的Hertility Health公司提供非侵入性檢測，可以幫助診斷九種常見的婦科疾病。
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公司的無聲可穿戴吸乳器在美國和英國都很暢銷；該公司的創始人塔尼亞·博勒說，公司的盆底訓練器由軟件控制，減少了進行常規治療的場景，在常規治療中，外科醫生會插入“一個漁網，撐起你正要從陰道中脫出的盆腔器官”。
That is welcome progress.
這是可喜的進展。
But too many femtechs face an uphill struggle.
但是太多的女性科技公司面臨著艱難的斗爭。
Helen O’Neill, who runs Hertility Health, calls the $5.7m funding round her firm closed in June a “soul-destroying” process.
Hertility Health的經營者Helen O'Neill稱，她的公司在6月份結束了一輪570萬美元的融資，她稱其是“摧毀靈魂”的過程。
“It was predominantly grey-haired men saying they are not sure there is a market for this,” she says.
她說：“在場的大多是頭發花白的男性，他們表示不確定這東西是否有市場。”
Never mind that all women with a reproductive system require gynaecological help at some point.
毫不在意這樣的事實：所有擁有生殖系統的女性在某些時候都需要婦科方面的幫助。
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