2025 nears a close, and whilst we all struggle to carve out quiet moments in the all-too-hectic holiday times, I increasingly find myself encouraged by where endometriosis research stands today—and where it’s potentially heading.
One small marker of that progress, where I have been directly involved: the EndoEther Directory now includes 53 players working across diagnostics, therapeutics, platforms, and care delivery. What initially started as a project to make this fragmented landscape more cohesive and visible is steadily becoming a reflection of real momentum and growth: more activity, more diversity of approaches, and more seriousness around solving long-neglected problems in female health.
Notable advances across the innovation stack:
Diagnostics continued to evolve beyond single-modality thinking. Saliva-based approaches, menstrual blood analysis, and other non-invasive methods are moving from fairly conceptual toward being clinically and commercially credible. Companies like Ziwig Biotech, NextGen Jane, Diamens, and others are helping to reframe how and when endometriosis can be detected.
Platform solutions (for example, endogene.bio, Metri Bio) are increasingly focused on building high-resolution biological and molecular datasets around endometriosis, integrating omics, phenotyping, and clinical metadata to better characterize disease subtypes and variability. Rather than treating endometriosis as a single entity, these approaches acknowledge its heterogeneity and lay the groundwork for more precise diagnostics, stratification, and ultimately more targeted interventions.
By including longitudinal symptom tracking within a broader network of information and analysis, the overdue but promising integration of lived experience into a larger datapool that informs clinical outcomes feels like a positive shift.
AI-enhanced imaging and ultrasound software (for example, XenaDx, Scanvio, EndoCure) is another area where meaningful progress is happening. Improved pattern recognition and decision-support tools are beginning to reduce operator dependency, an important step toward earlier and more unbiased diagnosis in a field where detection has long been shaped by underfunded training and symptom interpretation influenced by systemic clinical bias.
More funding for women's health
Another signal that matters: capital is finally flowing more consistently into female health and endometriosis-focused innovation. Not just headline-grabbing rounds, but a growing number of grants, early-stage investments, and translational funding efforts that de-risk bold ideas and help teams bring their research closer to patients.
I am cautiously optimistic that this shift will not only give a much-needed push to innovative founders, but also enable the correction of some of the wrong inferences and biased studies from the past.
Outlook
2025 showed that progress in endometriosis treatment and detection does not come from a single breakthrough. It comes from sustained, interdisciplinary, directed, and bundled effort. May the pieces continue to connect so that we can look ahead to 2026 and celebrate first clinical breakthroughs.