Category: 3. Business

Standard fludarabine plus cyclophosphamide has been selected as the only lymphodepletion regimen that will be used in the phase 2 ALPHA3 trial (NCT06500273) investigating first-line consolidation therapy with cemacabtagene ansegedleucel (cema-cel; formerly ALLO-501/A) in patients with large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL).¹

The lymphodepletion regimen was chosen via collaboration with the ALPHA3 Data and Safety Monitoring Board and Steering Committee, and this decision followed a consultation with the FDA.

Moreover, the arm of the trial evaluating cema-cel following lymphodepletion with fludarabine plus cyclophosphamide in combination with the CD52-directed monoclonal antibody ALLO-647 has been closed to further enrollment. This decision was made before the scheduled futility analysis due to the occurrence of a death in the cema-cel/fludarabine/cyclophosphamide/ALLO-647 arm that was attributed to treatment with ALLO-647. The grade 5 adverse effect of hepatic failure occurred on day 54 post-infusion and is believed to have been related to a disseminated adenovirus infection in the immune suppression setting. Notably, this event was deemed unrelated to treatment with cema-cel.

When severe viral infections have arisen in clinical trials initiated by Allogene Therapeutics—the developer of cema-cel—they have been partly attributed to immunosuppression from ALLO-647 use, according to a news release. However, Allogene trial investigators have reported no cases of hepatic failure or adenoviral infection in patients receiving lymphodepletion with fludarabine plus cyclophosphamide.

Now that standard fludarabine plus cyclophosphamide has been adopted as the lymphodepletion strategy for the ALPHA3 trial, no pipeline programs or trials that are open to enrollment are investigating ALLO-647.

“The loss of a patient is always deeply saddening, and we extend our heartfelt condolences to the patient’s family,” David Chang, MD, PhD, president, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Allogene, stated in the news release. “This event, which prompted an early review of the trial data, compelled us to make a decisive choice—one that may ultimately help bring this potentially life-saving therapy to patients more quickly. The ability to administer cema-cel following standard fludarabine plus cyclophosphamide lymphodepletion in an outpatient setting will simplify study treatment and has the potential to accelerate trial enrollment and streamline regulatory review, ultimately transforming care for patients.”

The amended ALPHA3 trial is a 2-arm randomized study of cema-cel following standard fludarabine plus cyclophosphamide lymphodepletion vs observation—the current standard of care for patients with LBCL following first-line treatment. Notably, the statistical design and prespecified conduct of the trial remain the same after the removal of the ALLO-647–containing arm.

The ongoing trial is enrolling patients at least 18 years of age with LBCL per WHO 2017 criteria—including diffuse LBCL, high-grade B-cell lymphoma, and primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma—that is confirmed by a pathology report.² Patients need to have completed a full course of standard first-line therapy, such as R-CHOP (rituximab [Rituxan], cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone), dose-adjusted EPOCH-R (etoposide phosphate, prednisone, vincristine sulfate [Oncovin], cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin hydrochloride [Hydroxydaunorubicin], and rituximab) or Pola-R-CHP (polatuzumab vedotin-piiq [Polivy], rituximab, cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, and prednisone); patients must not have received additional lines of therapy. Following first-line therapy, patients must have achieved a complete or partial response suitable for observation at the end of first-line therapy. Patients must also have an ECOG performance status of 0 or 1, as well as adequate renal, hematological, pulmonary, hepatic, and cardiac function. Nonhematologic toxicities associated with prior therapy must be recovered to baseline levels or grade 1 or lower.

Event-free survival serves as the trial’s primary end point. Secondary end points include progression-free survival, overall survival, safety, and minimal residual disease (MRD) clearance.

The futility analysis comparing MRD conversion rates between the 2 ongoing ALPHA3 arms is expected to occur in the first half of 2026.¹

References

1. Allogene Therapeutics moves forward with standard fludarabine and cyclophosphamide (FC) lymphodepletion regimen in the ALPHA3 trial for cemacabtagene ansegedleucel (cema-cel) in first-line consolidation for large B-cell lymphoma. News release. Allogene Therapeutics, Inc. August 1, 2025. Accessed August 4, 2025. https://ir.allogene.com/news-releases/news-release-details/allogene-therapeutics-moves-forward-standard-fludarabine-and
2. Consolidation of first-line MRD+ remission with cema-cel in patients with LBCL (ALPHA3). ClinicalTrials.gov. Updated June 25, 2025. Accessed August 4, 2025. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06500273

BP HAS made its largest oil and gas discovery since 1999 – a giant find off the coast of Brazil.

The Bumerangue prospect is located in the Santos basin, the largest offshore basin in Brazil, 404 km from Rio de Janeiro.

Found 5,855 km underground, the field has been likened to bp’s Shah Deniz gas field in the Caspian Sea, which produced around 28bn m3 of gas and more than 4m t of condensate in 2024 alone.

Bp has targets to produce 2.5m boe/d from its portfolio of oil and gas projects by 2030, an increase from 2.4 boe/d last year.

As part of its new plan, the company has 10 oil and gas projects starting up between this year and the end of 2027, and a further eight to 10 by 2030. The first 10 projects will be located in Egypt, Trinidad, the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

Energy mix

Bp has been operating in Brazil for more than 50 years, holding eight offshore blocks across three basins in the country.

Gordon Birrell, bp’s executive VP for production and operations, said: “Brazil is an important country for bp, and our ambition is to explore the potential of establishing a material and advantaged production hub in the country.”

The Bumerangue find is said to have a mix of gas, condensate and oil, as well as “elevated levels of carbon dioxide”. Bp says it will now conduct laboratory analyses to characterise the field and the fluids it holds.

In the phase 2 TOGETHER trial (NCT04867616), treatment with UCB’s bepranemab, an investigational monoclonal antibody targeting tau protein, led to slowing of tau accumulation in the tau mid-region in patients with prodromal to mild Alzheimer disease (AD). According to the study authors, this was the first clinical demonstration of such slowing, and marked the first time any tau-directed therapy has demonstrated a clinical benefit.¹

Presented at the 2025 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC), held July 27-31, in Toronto, Canada, the study included 466 patients who were randomly assigned 1:1:1 across 3 arms: 90 mg/kg bepranemab, 45 mg/kg bepranemab, and placebo. Across both arms, treatment with the tau-targeting therapy led to reduced tau accumulation by 33-58% relative to placebo after 80 weeks.

Study author William Byrnes, MD, global development lead at UCB, and colleagues used Genentech tau probe 1 (GTP1) and PET imaging tools at baseline, week 56, and week 80. The study comprised individuals aged 50-80 years with prodromal-mild AD, defined as National Institute on Aging and Alzheimer’s Association 2018 criteria Stage ¾. Coming into the study, patients had global Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) score of 0.5, and CDR-Memory Box score of at least 0.5.

In the latest AAIC data, bepranemab-treated patients had slowed tau accumulation in whole cortical gray (n = scanned/total: 90 mg/kg bepranemab [113 of 152]; 45 mg/kg bepranemab [104 of 152]; and placebo [97 of 156]) and jack temporal meta regions (90 mg/kg bepranemab [114 of 152]; 45 mg/kg bepranemab [105 of 152]; and placebo [97 of 156]) at week 80.

READ MORE: Biogen Showcases Promising 4-Year Data for Alzheimer Therapy Lecanemab at AAIC 2025

At the 2024 Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference, data from TOGETHER showed that the investigational agent had no effect on the primary end point of change in CRD-Sum of Boxes total score, compared with placebo at 80 weeks. Despite these results, bepranemab-treated patients showed a significant improvement in change between baseline and week 80 in Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive Subscale total score, a secondary end point of the study.²

Additional data from the previous readout highlighted a consistent treatment effect in a subgroup of patients with low tau burden who were non-carriers for apolipoprotein e4 (APOE4). In this post-hoc subgroup analysis, high-dose bepranemab (90 mg/kg) slowed the rate of tau accumulation vs placebo in key brain regions by 63%-67% at week 80, and slowed clinical progression by 29%, as measured by change in CDR-SB. In contrast, those with high tau at baseline who were APOE4 carriers had no benefit from high-dose bepranemab across clinical end points such as CDR-SB, A-iADL-Q, and ADSC-ADL scores.

In the previous update, Bepranemab had an acceptable safety profile, with an incidence of treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs), drug-related TEAEs, and TEAEs leading to dropout that were similar to that observed with placebo. Most reported TEAEs were infections and infestations (placebo: 50.3%; bepranemab: 50.2%), nervous system disorders (placebo: 40.1%; bepranemab: 35.2%), and musculoskeletal disorders (placebo: 26.8%; bepranemab: 28.3%).

Click here for more AAIC 2025 coverage.

REFERENCES
1. Maguire RP, Byrnes W, Barton ME, et al. Tau positron emission tomography results from TOGETHER, a double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase II study of bepranemab in prodromal–mild Alzheimer’s disease. Presented at: AAIC 2025; July 27-31; ABSTRACT 99279
2. UCB Presents Encouraging Data on Bepranemab in Early Alzheimer’s Disease in Phase 2a Study at CTAD 2024. News release. UCB. October 31, 2024. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://www.ucb.com/newsroom/press-releases/article/ucb-presents-encouraging-data-on-bepranemab-in-early-alzheimer-s-disease-in-phase-2a-study-at-ctad-2024

“Relative to other companies, a lot fewer people from Anthropic have been caught by these. And it’s not for lack of trying,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently revealed on the Big Technology Podcast. “I’ve talked to plenty of people who got these offers at Anthropic and who just turned them down. Who wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg.”

Meta’s been on a tear to dominate AI—and if it can’t grow the talent internally, its CEO Zuckerberg has no qualms about buying it instead. In June, reports revealed that he’s been poaching staff at competitor companies (including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic) with $100 million signing bonuses, in an effort to beef up his “superintelligence” AI lab. 

Some have taken up his envy-inducing offer, including at least seven staffers from OpenAI, but Amodei insisted that most of his employees haven’t taken the bait—and he’s not throwing money at staff to keep them.

Why Anthropic’s CEO won’t use cash to convince workers to stay

Employers may be tempted to fight fire with fire by raising their AI stars’ salaries or recruiting others in return—but Anthropic thinks it would hurt its company culture. 

“We are not willing to compromise our compensation principles, our principles of fairness, to respond individually to these offers,” Amodei said. “The way things work at Anthropic is there’s a series of levels. One candidate comes in, they get assigned a level, and we don’t negotiate that level, because we think it’s unfair. We want to have a systematic way.”

Amodei not only thinks that it’s unfair to raise salaries to have his workers stick around, but that it could actually backfire on his billion-dollar company’s mission. In actuality, staying true to his compensation practices amid the poaching chaos has been a win for Anthropic’s culture. 

“I think actually this was a unifying moment for the company where we didn’t give in. We refused to compromise our principles, because we had the confidence that people are Anthropic because they truly believe in the mission,” Amodei continued. 

“The only way you can really be hurt by this is if you allow it to destroy the culture of your company by panicking, by treating people unfairly, in an attempt to defend the company.”

Fortune has reached out to Anthropic and Meta for comment.

Amodei’s criticism of Zuckerberg’s $100 million poaching strategy

Zuckerberg’s aggressive poaching strategy has ruffled some feathers in the AI world. Being scooped up with a $100 million pay package is a dream for most, but the Anthropic CEO has called out the practice for being fundamentally unfair. 

“If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dart board and hits your name, that doesn’t mean that you should be paid 10 times more than the guy next to you who’s just as skilled, who’s just as talented,” Amodei said on the podcast. 

Plus, Amodei thinks the hiring strategy is flat-out counterproductive to what Meta wants to get done. The CEO is proud of his staffers for not giving in to the $100 million offer—and that same loyalty isn’t something that can be bought. And other AI talent seem to want in on Amodei’s culture; engineers at OpenAI were eight times more likely to leave the company for Anthropic. The company also has an 80% retention rate for employees hired over the last two years, compared to 78% at Google DeepMind, and 67% at OpenAI. Ironically, Meta is trailing behind at 64%.

Having employees who can do revolutionary work is one thing, but having a culture that makes them want to stay is another. By poaching others, Amodei doubts Meta is recruiting the best fits for its mission. 

“I think that what they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought: and that is alignment with the mission. I think there are selection effects here,” he said. “Are they getting the people who are most enthusiastic, who are most mission aligned, who are most excited?”

Other tech leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have echoed Amodei’s criticism. Altman said that while Meta has managed to poach some staffers, “so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” Even though Zuckerberg has snatched some of his AI workers, Altman is doubtful that his competitor will be able to replicate the same success of OpenAI.

“I think that there’s a lot of people, and Meta will be a new one, that are saying ‘We’re just going to try to copy OpenAI,’” Altman said on the Uncapped podcast last month. “That basically never works. You’re always going to where your competitor was, and you don’t build up a culture of learning what it’s like to innovate.”

Three new research projects — a treatment for childhood ear infections, an AI-powered tool to link databases and a novel gene editing method for therapeutics — will receive funding and training to transform university research into new ventures and products that can benefit society.

These projects and the Cornell inventors behind them were selected for the Ignite Fellow for New Ventures program, which helps transform promising technologies into startups that can benefit society. Since its launch in 2022, the program has supported 15 research-based projects and graduated six startups. More projects are expected to graduate to form new ventures in the coming months. 

The program is managed by Cornell’s Center for Technology Licensing (CTL), which supports researchers and innovators in translating discoveries into startups. “Cornell researchers are dedicated to tackling critical problems for the greater good,” said Alice Li, executive director at CTL. “This program accelerates their way into society where they can truly make a difference.” 

The 2025 Ignite Fellows and their projects include:

Middle Ear Immune Therapy

Fellow: Wenjing Tang, Postdoctoral Associate

Faculty: Rong Yang, Associate Professor at R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Middle ear infections are one of the most common reasons children are prescribed antibiotics, but standard oral treatments can cause side effects and contribute to antibiotic resistance. This project is developing a new method for delivering antibiotics directly and non-invasively into the middle ear, using specially designed particles to target the infection site in a single dosage. This approach aims for safer, more effective treatment with fewer systemic side effects and no negative impact on auditory function. Yang received Cornell’s Ignite Innovation Acceleration funding in 2024, which helped advance the technology’s early-stage research toward commercialization.

SwellDB

Fellow: Victor Giannakouris Salalidis, Ph.D. student 

Faculty: Immanuel Trummer, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science

In large organizations, analysts often struggle to analyze data that is scattered across different formats — from structured databases to raw files, documents or webpages. Identifying relevant sources, integrating them and extracting insights can be a time consuming and technically complex process. SwellDB, a generative AI-powered data system, addresses this challenge by using large language models to simplify the way users interact with disparate data sources. The system allows users to pose natural language questions and, in response, autonomously finds, retrieves, and organizes relevant data across formats and locations. By making data analysis more intuitive and accessible, SwellDB supports faster and more confident decision-making in fields ranging from healthcare to business intelligence.

RNA-Guided Transposons

Fellow: Robert Wingo, Ph.D. student

Faculty: Joseph Peters, Department Chair and Professor of Microbiology at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS)

Precise DNA editing is critical for developing new therapies and improving agriculture. However, most current gene-editing tools, such as CRISPR-Cas9, cut both strands of DNA, which can lead to unintended mutations or cell damage. This team is developing a safe and accurate tool inspired by natural bacterial systems, called transposons, capable of delivering new, complex genes to precise locations without cutting the DNA in two. The technology could lead to more effective treatments for genetic diseases, improved cancer therapies, and advancements in biotechnology and agriculture. Peters also received Ignite Innovation Acceleration funds in 2024 and 2025, which helped the team pursue venture creation. 

“Becoming an entrepreneur is not just about starting a company, it is about creating a vehicle for innovation that has the potential to change lives,” Wingo said. “The Ignite Fellow program represents the perfect environment to refine and execute this vision, equipping me with the skills and network needed to turn this ambition into a reality.”

The Fellow for New Ventures program provides master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral researchers with a structured, cohort-based pathway to launch startups from Cornell innovations. The fellows receive mentoring, training and funding for commercialization expenses, including customer discovery, market analysis, legal support and prototype development. They also gain access to dedicated business development resources at Ithaca incubators — the Center for Life Science Ventures and the Praxis Center for Venture Development — or at the Runway Startups program at Cornell Tech in New York City, providing a strong foundation for building a company.

The three new fellows will join an active entrepreneurial community at Cornell, further demonstrating the university’s commitment to turning research into solutions that benefit society.

“One of the strengths of the Ignite Fellow program is its focus on supporting the people behind these innovations,” Li said. “These awardees are not only pushing the frontiers of science and engineering but also gaining the entrepreneurial skills they need to bring their work to market.”

The Ignite Fellow for New Ventures is one of four signature Ignite programs offered by CTL to help Cornell researchers and innovators move discoveries from the lab to the marketplace. Cornell’s broader technology commercialization ecosystem — including gap funding programs, intellectual property protection, licensing support and venture mentorship — has helped launch hundreds of startups addressing challenges in health, agriculture, engineering and sustainability, among other fields.

 

The firing of a top United States statistics official by President Donald Trump last week has drawn concerns from economists and policymakers regarding the credibility of data in the world’s biggest economy.

Trump’s dismissal of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the release of disappointing employment figures on Friday has raised fears over the integrity of Washington’s economic data, which are relied on by countless businesses and investors in the US and across the world.

The National Association for Business Economics warned that McEntarfer’s “baseless” ouster risked doing “lasting harm to the institutions that support American economic stability”.

“It could open the door to political meddling and certainly will undermine trust in federal statistics that businesses, policymakers and individuals use to make some of their most important decisions,” Erica Groshen, who led the Bureau of Labor Statistics under former President Barack Obama, told Al Jazeera.

If Trump’s dismissal of McEntarfer and other presidential appointees is allowed to stand, Groshen said, he could make a habit of firing any head of a statistical agency or other body that delivers “unwelcome news”.

“Then he is likely to replace them with appointees who prioritise serving his goals over serving the mission of their agencies, ethical standards or scientific integrity,” Groshen said.

Trump, who justified McEntarfer’s removal by claiming without evidence that the latest job figures were “rigged” to make him look bad, said on Sunday that he would announce a new Bureau of Labor Statistics head in three or four days.

‘Global ramifications’

A collapse in trust in official economic data about the US would have ramifications worldwide.

Despite the growing influence of emerging economies such as China and India, the US remains the world’s largest economy by some distance.

The US gross domestic product (GDP) at about $30.3 trillion accounts for more than one-quarter of the global economy. China’s estimated GDP is about two-thirds that amount.

US government data on trade, employment, consumer spending and GDP are considered important signals for the direction of the global economy and are closely followed by businesses and investors from London to Dubai and Tokyo.

Many countries, including democratic states, have faced accusations of fiddling with economic statistics for political reasons, often with serious reputational consequences.

In 2010, the European Commission published a withering report accusing Greece of deliberately falsifying data to conceal the poor state of its public finances.

In 2013, the International Monetary Fund officially censured Argentina for providing what it said was inaccurate data on inflation and economic growth.

‘Economic data manipulation’

Some research suggests that countries run by strong-arm leaders are especially prone to misrepresenting the state of their economies.

A 2024 study published in the European Journal of Political Economy found that economic openness and democracy decreased the likelihood of governments manipulating statistics although there were no observable positive effects from media freedom or the independence of the statistical office.

In a 2022 paper that used satellite imagery of nighttime light as a proxy for economic development, Luis Martinez, a professor at the University of Chicago, estimated that autocratic countries artificially inflated their annual GDP growth by about 35 percent.

“Economic data manipulation is pervasive in history, especially in autocracies and dictatorships to create narratives for the people – typically to embellish standards of living,” Tomasz Michalski, an associate professor of economics at the HEC Paris business school, told Al Jazeera.

“What is rarer, though, is to find such deliberate behaviour in countries that strive to be democracies or are more developed.”

After Trump’s firing of McEntarfer, a career economist who was appointed in 2024 with overwhelming bipartisan support, critics were quick to note parallels to tactics attributed to strongman leaders seeking to bolster public approval for their policies.

“It’s one more step on our rapid descent into banana republic status,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said on Substack, a subscription-based newsletter platform.

Lawrence Summers, who served as US Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, described the firing as the “stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism”.

Scott Sumner, a professor of economics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said Trump’s move made the US “look more like a banana republic” although it remained to be seen whether he would seek to directly manipulate the government’s economic figures.

“It’s actually hard to fool the public, and almost no one was fooled by the Argentina manipulation,” Sumner told Al Jazeera.

“It’s too soon to say whether Trump will try to do the same. Any attempt to do so would likely fail.”

‘The quality of US economic statistics’

The quality of US economic data has been a growing concern for some time due in part to the Trump administration’s freeze on hiring federal employees and staff cuts at numerous agencies.

In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dissolved two expert committees that advised the government on its economic statistics, prompting concern among some economists.

In June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that it had stopped collecting price-related data in three US cities – Buffalo, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Provo, Utah – due to limitations in “current resources”.

But even before Trump’s return to the White House in January, declining response rates to surveys among the public in recent years had made the collection of data increasingly difficult, raising concerns about accuracy.

In a poll published by the Reuters news agency last month, 89 of 100 policy experts surveyed said they had at least some concerns about the quality of US economic statistics.

“Some data is just unreliable because people stopped responding to surveys or the responses became so biased given the nonhomogeneous response rates,” said Michalski, the HEC Paris associate professor.

“There are no easy remedies often for improving data collection given that many people are not using landlines, are unreachable or provide careless answers to investigators,” he said.

Even with sound methodology, data are always at risk of manipulation once politicians get involved, Michalski added.

“Even with correct numbers, it is possible to spin a story about inflation or GDP growth by changing the base years or selecting some specific periods to weave narratives,” he said.

“The incentives to manipulate and falsify are clearly there. There is little or no punishment.”

Groshen said that while she does not expect US economic data to stop being reliable in the immediate future, “we seem headed in that direction.”

“For now, the BLS will continue to operate as it has before,” she said.

“We will need to start worrying if and when the president’s people are embedded there.”

The hardest part about being a pediatrician is having to tell the parents their precious baby did not survive. The second hardest is not being able to explain why.

Preeclampsia is a significant cause of death for mothers and newborns in places like Karachi and in Seattle, where I live now, yet we do not know what causes it and there is no cure.

The primary reason for this deadly gap in our knowledge is neglect. According to a 2021 analysis led by McKinsey & Company, just 1% of healthcare research and innovation is invested in female-specific conditions beyond oncology. And for conditions that affect women and men, women are severely underrepresented in clinical trials, so we’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding how women experience common conditions like cardiovascular diseases.

As a result, there is a long list of serious and pervasive conditions without good solutions, including autoimmune diseases, heavy menstrual bleeding, and endometriosis. Endometriosis causes severe pelvic pain and affects one in 10 women globally, but it’s so misunderstood that 65% of women are initially misdiagnosed.

This is why, despite living longer than men, women spend more time in poor health—no matter where in the world they live.

Finding answers to longstanding questions about women’s health is a big driver of our gender equality work at the Gates Foundation. This also is fundamental to achieving our 20-year goals of helping end preventable deaths of moms and babies, reducing suffering from deadly infectious diseases, and lifting millions out of poverty onto a path to prosperity.

We’re proud to have contributed with our partners to the incredible progress made over the last 25 years: maternal mortality declined by 40%, expanded access to the HPV vaccine has prevented over 1 million future cases of cervical cancer, and advancements in contraceptives have given women better tools to help them decide whether and when to get pregnant. We still have a long way to go, which is why I am pleased the foundation announced today that it is committing $2.5 billion to women’s health innovation over the next five years.

That commitment is a good start. But it’s also a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. I think the rest of the bucket can and should be filled up by private sector partners.

That’s because women in high-income countries have many of the same health problems in common with women in low- and middle-income countries. There is a massive untapped market opportunity to invent and deliver the solutions women everywhere need. Biotech, consumer health, and pharmaceutical companies should be doing more in women’s health. Above and beyond the moral reasons, it simply makes good business sense.

McKinsey & Company estimates that investing in treatments for endometriosis, for example, has a market potential of $180 billion to $250 billion, comparable to the market for big-ticket conditions like diabetes.

Or consider the many use cases for an AI-powered portable ultrasound, which the foundation helped to develop for the two thirds of women in low- and middle-income countries who don’t have access to expensive ultrasound machines. It’s a wand that plugs into a tablet running an algorithm trained with thousands of ultrasound images, and it can be used by workers who haven’t been trained in obstetrics. Research shows this simple device can identify high-risk pregnancies early and even identify gestational age with more accuracy than humans.

This tool is very useful in remote Kenya, one of the areas where the AI ultrasound was tested. But it’s just as useful in, say, North Dakota, where one in four women have to drive for over an hour to reach the nearest birthing hospital. In 2022, about 2.3 million U.S. women of child-bearing age lived in “maternity deserts,” defined as counties without a hospital, birth center, and doctors and nurse midwives with experience delivering babies.

Thanks to advances in AI, this tool can be adapted for uses beyond obstetric care. Today, people travel to specialty care or emergency rooms to get screened for conditions like breast cancer and heart disease. With portable imaging devices, those screenings could one day be done at local primary care facilities in both high- and low-income countries.

The list of opportunities goes on. Preeclampsia is tricky to diagnose, because women can present with the main symptoms of high blood pressure and proteinuria for many reasons. False positives lead to long, unnecessary hospitalizations, while false negatives can result in a last-minute scramble with fatal consequences. The state-of-the-art sFIt-1PIGF ratio test removes the uncertainty by measuring the levels of two proteins that play a role in the development of new blood vessels in the placenta. In 2024, the FDA approved the test for use in the United States, and the Gates Foundation is supporting studies to adapt it for use in low- and middle-income countries.

Last year, a colleague of mine at the foundation was concerned she might have preeclampsia. She’d been monitoring her blood pressure on her own, but the results were inconclusive. She took the sFIt-1PIFG test at 26 weeks, and it confirmed she had preeclampsia and predicted how much time she had left until she would have to deliver. She was immediately hospitalized and intensely monitored. Six weeks later she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl whose name, Mihika, means “dew drops.”

This test can save the lives of women like my colleague, and it can also save the lives of women like those I used to care for back in Karachi.

And the test is just the beginning. There is still no cure for preeclampsia, and preeclampsia is just one of many woman-specific issues that need solving. If we could close the gap for nine major conditions, it would create 27 million years of healthy life per year—or about three extra healthy days every single year for every single woman on the planet.

That’s the right thing to do. It’s also a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors. Women around the world have waited too long for better solutions. Together, we can deliver.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.