More needs to be done by industry to advance scientific research on women during all phases of their lifecycle to improve product development targeting this population, say experts.
January 13, 2025
Speaking last month during a Women in Nutraceuticals (WIN) webinar entitled Trends and Innovations in Developing Nutraceuticals for Women, a panel of industry experts brainstormed the opportunities and challenges in this category. All agreed there is a clear need to go back and build out the science for women from the ground up.
“Women are not a monolith,” said Devon Gholam PhD, vice-president of science and innovation at the consultancy Step Change Innovations. “We are all at different phases of our lives, and even if we're at the same phase, we might have different needs.”
Today, she said, there remains a “huge data gap” between scientific data published on men versus women, and thus there is a timely need to establish more science specific to women's physiology and how ingredients impact their bodies.
Linda Alvarez MD, CEO and founder of female sports nutrition startup Levelle Nutrition, agreed, stating how vital it is to track and analyse women's health across all life stages when developing nutritional products for this consumer group.
“As we go through our different lifecycle phases, our hormones change, our physiology changes, our micro- and macronutrient metabolism changes. And I'm so excited to see so much research is coming forward towards that end, but there's so much more work to be done,” she said.
Currently, it is hard to find nutritional products that back women during pregnancy or breastfeeding stages, for example, and there are still significant research gaps for nutraceuticals targeting women aged 45 to 85-plus, she said.
In research terms, Alvarez said women had long been considered “small men” in science and product development – and that had to change.
Chris Lamb, VP of commercial strategy at ingredient manufacturer Cepham, agreed.
“There's historical gaps in research,” he said. “Historically, women are treated as small men – and it's not just the supplements space, it's pharmaceutical research.”
He added: “An interesting stat that really opened my eyes is that if you look at the US population, 51% is women, but participation in studies by women is about 25%. There's a huge gap there.”
For companies developing formulations specifically targeting women's nutritional needs, therefore, existing data from the wider population are not relevant enough, he argued.
“Women and men are different. Fundamentally, physiology is different,” he said. “And so, you have to design a study that is representative of the population you want this ingredient studied in.”
Gholam said there was a clear need for more women to participate in clinical trials to validate data, but also to conduct these clinical trials; indeed, more women were needed in the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields overall.
However, studying women, she said, has long been considered a challenge because of hormonal variability across cycles and risks associated with potential pregnancies during clinical trials.
“Those are thought of, traditionally, as challenges when it comes to designing clinical trials, but I like to push the idea that we can look at them as opportunities,” she said.
“Find ways to account for that hormonal variability or find ways to subsegment your data for different parts of the cycle. Have greater participation in trials to help decrease variability. Look at these as opportunities to get that data, so then we can make solutions that are more tailored for women's needs at that specific time.”
Lamb agreed, adding that women-targeted studies would also benefit from being conducted for longer durations, beyond the traditional 56-day study time and closer to six months to a year, to account for hormonal fluctuations during a woman’s menstrual cycle. While this might delay commercialisation of a product, he said pushing commercial aspirations aside was vital if companies wanted to capture meaningful data on women.
Cepham, for example, is working with its brand partners to shift traditional ideologies around ingredient and formulation research when targeting women, he said. A brand looking to target menopausal women would be encouraged to narrow that window down even further for research purposes – to early menopause or post-menopause populations, depending on the target consumer group, he said.
He added: “It takes a little bit of time, but if you do that first, you know what you're researching when you develop the supplement.”
Alvarez said getting out and speaking directly to women was also vital – for both brands and suppliers – as there were always angles that had not been considered.
“I'm still having customer interviews every week. It's so important when formulating and bringing products to market,” she said.
