About WHIN.live
The Women’s Health Innovation Network (WHIN)
The Women’s Health Innovation Network (WHIN) is a new and growing collaboration in NE Florida leveraging one of the nation’s largest medical hubs to support individuals and companies looking to develop a product or service that addresses the overall health and well-being of women and girls.
Scheduled for launch in Fall of 2024, WHIN will provide incubation and accelerator programs both in person and virtually to accelerate and enhance the successful commercialization of products and services primarily focused on women’s health. Planned offerings include dedicated or shared office space, conference facilities, access to mentors who can assist with finding funding and forming relationships with angel and venture investment groups; access to legal and accounting help; finding qualified individuals to round out your team.
Growing a company is a complex, multi-faceted effort. Founders of early-stage companies need access to expert advice, mentoring, and investment. WHIN programs will provide all this and more.
Our Goals
Increased Number of Solutions to Address Women’s Medical Conditions
There is a plethora of female-specific medical conditions for which we struggle to know the cause, the cure, or how to properly diagnose. One or more of these medical conditions impact more than half the population. Addressing this disparity is one of the largest opportunities in health care in generations.
Inclusive Participation and Increased Innovation Capacity
Equitable Access to Healthcare
Recognizing the challenges faced by working women, minorities and people living in rural areas, companies are creating new technology-enabled tools to enable more equitable access to healthcare. These include platforms that help navigate the healthcare system, virtual tele-health services, and other assistive technologies for patient self-care. An estimated 35% of healthcare services that are traditionally provided in person can be transitioned to virtual formats of delivery enabling virtual care to remote areas not near medical facilities.
Expanded Scientific Body of Knowledge Advancing Research & Education
It wasn’t until 2016 that NIH started requiring all NIH-funded research to include female subjects. There is, therefore, much to be learned about why treatments that works for men may not work the same for women. WHIN companies will foster greater knowledge about our anatomical and physiological differences and how to incorporate a gender-inclusive design approach to future medical research, training, and product development.
Achieving our Goals
Through extensive outreach efforts, WHIN will engage participants from diverse backgrounds throughout the community to participate in Innovation Challenges to identify potentially viable solutions to topic specific women’s health challenges. It will also leverage patented research discoveries available for licensing from collaborating research institutions in the region and throughout the country by using the AUTM Innovation Marketplace portal that currently lists more than 31,000 technologies available for licensing.
Solutions deemed to be potentially viable will advance to the next step in the process wherein further research and customer discovery will be conducted to assess both the technical merit of the potential solution as well as its market opportunity. This research will be done by engaging diverse teams in immersive entrepreneurial training previously developed by WHIN leadership and funded by the Department of Labor that generated a 14:1 substantiated Return on Investment from a $12 million grant.
Solutions identified as having technical merit and substantial market opportunity will then advance to the translational step wherein WHIN will help newly formed startups and existing companies to advance the idea to a technology readiness level that will make it attractive to private investment.
Newly formed startups will have access to the WHIN Incubator services augmented with mentors from the SBA funded SCORE network of over 12,000 volunteer business mentors nationwide and from our lengthy list of WHIN partners. The Florida seed fund established in 2007 with a $36 million investment from the state is part of our network and is actively seeking to invest in more diverse founders. They will play a key role in helping WHIN startups get access to capital.
WHIN Innovation Cycle
