Spanish Scientists Combat Gender Blindness in Medical Research

Medical research operates under a quiet but consequential blind spot: the diseases that affect only women barely register in the world's research budgets. The numbers tell the story plainly. Women make up just a third of the global research workforce. Only five percent of medications have been tested, monitored, and labeled with information about use during pregnancy and lactation. Most starkly, according to the World Economic Forum, a mere seven percent of all medical research funding flows toward health problems that affect women exclusively. These are not small gaps. They are structural absences.

In Murcia, a gynecologist named María Luisa Sánchez-Ferrer decided to address one of them. Working through a research initiative called Dufic, funded by the CaixaImpulse health innovation program, she and her team developed a new approach to detecting endometrial cancer. The traditional method—a tissue biopsy—is painful, often yields insufficient material for accurate diagnosis, and delays the moment when treatment can begin. Sánchez-Ferrer's group, led by researcher Analuce Canha under the supervision of professors Pilar Coy and Rafael Latorre at the University of Murcia, turned instead to the fluid the uterus naturally produces. A specially designed catheter collects samples of this uterine fluid in a minimally invasive procedure that is both more effective and far less painful than conventional biopsies.

Canha frames the work in terms that go beyond the technical. She speaks of "research with a gender perspective"—the idea that women's diseases deserve the same rigor and resources as any other medical condition, and that healthcare professionals must take seriously the pain women report. "If it's pain that incapacitates you, it deserves attention," she says. "You need the tests, the investigation, until you reach a clear diagnosis." The implication is sharp: women's suffering has been minimized, their symptoms dismissed, their conditions deprioritized. The research itself is an act of correction.

Across the country in Barcelona, Dr. Patricia Pozo-Rosich runs the Migraine Adaptive Brain Center, a research hub established through a partnership between Hospital Vall d'Hebron and the same foundation. Migraine affects millions of women, yet it remains poorly understood and often invisible to those who do not experience it. Pozo-Rosich has heard the phrase enough times to know it captures something real: "I can't move because of a problem in my head that nobody can see." The disease is there. The evidence is not.

Her center approaches migraine through three interconnected research streams. The first examines preclinical models—the basic biology of the condition. The second explores translational research, tracking what happens at different stages of the disease. The third searches for objective biomarkers: measurable molecules in saliva, tears, or blood that could replace the subjective reporting that currently defines migraine diagnosis. If successful, these biomarkers would transform treatment. Doctors could move from listening to patients describe their pain to reading it in their biology. Pozo-Rosich calls this shift "the great revolution nobody expects." It would mean that women's most debilitating conditions could finally be diagnosed not on faith, but on fact.

Both projects exist because researchers chose to see a gap and fill it. They are not solving the larger problem—the structural underinvestment in women's health, the shortage of women in research leadership, the cultural tendency to doubt women's reports of their own suffering. But they are building the evidence base that might, eventually, make that larger change inevitable. The work is slow. The funding is limited. But the direction is clear.