In several countries, 8 March is recognised as Women’s History Month and, of course, International Women’s Day is celebrated around the world on 8 March but – full disclosure – the timing of this article is a coincidence, albeit a fitting one.
As my screen flickers to life, from London a smiling Andreas Hadjimitsis appears, ready to talk to GOLD for the March edition of the magazine.
The founder of Genie Fertility, a London-based biotech startup, talks about how he and his team have developed a non-invasive diagnostic test to assess uterine health and created a tool that few men – but most women – knew was needed.
Before we delve into his biology- and data-driven world, however, it is important to confront a few hard truths. Women’s health remains significantly underfunded compared with other areas of medicine, despite women making up half the population and experiencing distinct, complex biological processes across a lifetime. Change is overdue since there can be no real future for healthcare if access to diagnosis and treatment remains selective.
London-based Andreas Hadjimitsis did not begin his career with a view to disrupting this imbalance. As an undergraduate studying Natural Sciences (Biological) and Systems Biology, he was very much what he calls “a wet-lab scientist, playing with bacteria, viruses and cells.” But, around 2016, something shifted: biology, he explains, was becoming data-rich. Sequencing technologies were exploding, information was everywhere but it remained underused. “We were generating a lot of data in biology,” he recalls. “It’s not just one gene that does something, in the same way that it’s not just one hormone that causes a particular result. If you combine the lab, computational analysis and even hardware – building the systems that process it – then suddenly you can understand much more.”
A social and technical problem
The problem, with women’s health, he argues, is both social and technical. The uterus – the very centre of women’s health – has been largely overlooked, in part because it is only accessible primarily via biopsy. “That’s invasive, difficult and expensive. It limits what you can study and animal models offer little help,” Hadjimitsis explains.
Then came a realisation. Menstrual blood contains the very cells that researchers seek through biopsy. “Blood contains all the cells that are present in the uterus. You can even culture uterine cells from it,” he says, “so we asked ourselves: why can’t we use this so-called waste product as a non-invasive, easily accessible way to study the uterus?”
I hesitate before asking what feels like an obvious question. If menstrual blood holds such promise, why has it taken so long to reach such a significant conclusion? “It’s difficult to process,” he says candidly. “Menstrual blood isn’t a simple specimen. You know better than I do – it varies from day to day, cycle to cycle, woman to woman. To extract something meaningful out of it, you have to do a lot of work. But now, with developing techniques – essentially in processing findings and obtaining even more data – it’s possible to start working with menstrual blood and understand what is happening with it.”
The word “difficult” seems to linger in any discussion regarding women’s health, which has long been dismissed as complicated, hormonally messy, variable, unpredictable and more. Yet difficulty in other areas of medicine has inspired investment, not retreat. Oncology, once equally opaque, now commands some of the most sophisticated research infrastructures in the world. That is still not the case for women’s health issues. “I often say that women’s health today is where cancer was in the 1980s,” Hadjimitsis says. “It faces limited understanding, fragmented treatments, significant side-effects and a lack of education on the part of investors, pharmaceutical companies and society itself – it is almost like building a new market! We have anchored Genie Fertility to a future in which women’s healthcare is going to grow further. It is already a big market, worth around $30 billion, and it’s growing really fast. This is not a niche area but one that affects everyone.”
Overcoming structural barriers
Genie Fertility, which leverages machine learning and omics to unlock a pipeline of novel reproductive health markers and therapies, raised $1.22 million in pre-seed funding – no small feat in a cautious biotech climate – yet structural barriers remain. “When you walk into a room of investors, 90% of whom are men, their understanding of women’s health is often second-hand. We hear, ‘My wife experienced this’ or ‘Someone I know went through that.’ Sometimes personal experience helps but often there simply isn’t any.”
So, what persuaded investors to back Genie Fertility? The company was young and the data early-stage but it was showing momentum. “It wasn’t easy,” Hadjimitsis admits, “but, in two months, we achieved what some companies take years to do – pilots, securing agreements with clinics and other companies. That made investors place their bets.”
Genie Fertility’s co-founder, Anoushka Menon, whom Hadjimitsis met through a business accelerator, commercialised the first at-home fertility test in the UK. She had spent her career in women’s health and their shared awareness of the chronic lack of investment and medical tools in the field was instrumental. “She told me how underfunded it was, how much was missing, how limited the understanding was – and still is,” he recalls. “But there’s now a new generation of women’s health companies emerging – science-first and focused on generating real data.”
That was when he realised exactly what he wanted to do: to bring data and information to an area of health that really needed it. “There are very few large, pharmaceutical companies focused solely on women’s health in the way there are for other disease areas,” he notes. “Part of what we’re doing is helping build a future in which women’s health stands on equal footing.”
Building foundational understanding
Genie Fertility is currently positioning itself in the IVF arena, where demand from both clinics and patients is immediate. But the company’s ambition stretches further to deal with endometriosis, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), menopause and broader diagnostics. “What we’re building is foundational understanding,” he says. “If you understand how the uterus works at a molecular level, you can diagnose earlier, stratify disease and identify drug targets.”
Diagnosis for conditions such as endometriosis can often take up to a decade: a decade of dismissal and pain. “We can take it down to less than a year,” he says. There is an urgency in his voice as he says this – not the breathless urgency of hype but that of someone who is aware that delay has a human cost.
When Hadjimitsis tells me that he has set 2027 as the year in which the product will be ready, I can’t help raising an eyebrow, which he notices. “Yes, it’s ambitious, I know,” he says with a smile, “but this is something that has been missing for far too long.”
Genie Fertility, founded in autumn 2024, is already working with four clinics – two in the UK, one in Spain and one in Cyprus. These are carefully selected partners, he emphasises, as this is not just about volume. It’s about doing things properly. In the next decade, he envisions a shift away from what he calls “the pink-website era” of superficial solutions towards science-first companies grounded in robust data. “We’ll see better diagnostics, better therapies and a stronger scientific basis for understanding women’s health. Conditions like endometriosis have multiple subtypes. They’re not simple – we need to stratify them properly before we can treat them effectively.” His face lights up when he speaks of it in an obvious combination of scientific fascination and moral conviction.
Better diagnostics, better therapies and a stronger scientific basis
He does not come from a medical dynasty, I discover. “Not at all,” he laughs. “My parents are in law and banking. I just liked biology and understanding how the human body works and I think that’s what made me want to get deeper and deeper into it. In Cyprus, there’s a tendency for people to avoid taking risks – to choose the stable job, the secure income. I think I moved away from that.” Perhaps risk is the thread running through Hadjimitsis’ story. The risk of investing in complexity, believing that women’s pain deserves the same scientific rigour as any other disease and building something that treats reproductive health not as a niche area but as infrastructure. The gap is not merely financial: it is also scientific and cultural. When we fail to fund women’s health adequately, we are not merely delaying treatments and when we accept ten-year diagnostic journeys as normal and treat invasive procedures as inevitable, we are embedding inequality into clinical pathways.
Menstrual blood, long shrouded in silence and stigma, may yet become a symbol of something larger: access without invasion, data without dismissal and understanding without condescension. Healthcare cannot be selective or efficient for some and elusive for others. If innovation is to mean anything, it must close gaps, not merely monetise them. And perhaps, somewhere between lab tests and algorithms, between data and lived experience, that closing has already begun – and Genie Fertility is one place where it is taking shape.
In the next decade, we’ll see better diagnostics, better therapies and a stronger scientific basis for understanding women’s health
This interview first appeared in the March edition of GOLD magazine. Click here to view it.
