Women’s health encompasses the unique biological, hormonal, and reproductive factors that shape health outcomes across a woman’s life, from menstruation and fertility to menopause and beyond. Despite its broad impact, women’s health has historically been underfunded and underprioritized in research and innovation, leaving critical gaps in understanding and care. Women’s health diagnostics are helping to close these gaps by enabling earlier detection, prevention, and management of conditions such as cervical and breast cancer, reproductive and hormonal disorders, and pregnancy-related complications. DeciBio sat down with Sarita Stefani to explore what’s changing in women’s health today and what remains to be done.

Sarita Stefani is the co-founder and CEO of Amilis, an AI-powered clinical decision support system for reproductive doctors. Her background spans finance and data product management, and she holds a master’s degree from the University of Westminster.

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To start off, it would be great to get a bit more about your background and learn about what inspired you to found your current company.

Absolutely. My background is very different from others in the space. I studied history of art for my bachelor’s degree, but ultimately, I ended up pursuing a master’s in international finance at Westminster University. I eventually went into health tech, working in customer success. It was amazing meeting people in oncology because they were doing something good for humanity. It felt like I was finally where I belonged.  

From there, I joined other companies in the ecosystem and became an expert in real world evidence data and epidemiology data. I was speaking and working with pharma companies, but one morning, I woke up in my very comfortable job and decided that I was not doing enough.  

I froze my eggs, and I found the process lacking in many ways. From there, I started analyzing women's health data. We know so little about our ovaries as patients, and the information in research just isn’t there, so I decided to dedicate my life to changing this. And that's how Amilis started.  

It was very much a personal journey from egg freezing and the fact that I realized I was 32 years old, and I didn't know anything about my ovaries. I didn't know what my AMH or fertility level was and never had a transvaginal ultrasound before, which is shockingly common. At the same time, I met my co-founder, so all the stars aligned. We started with egg freezing as a niche because that's what I knew the most, but now we are way beyond that, extending into gynecological care and fertility care. Our data, enhanced with machine learning and AI, is dedicated to improving treatments in the future.  

This is a story that we hear so often about the lack of information around the reproductive health journey. At DeciBio, we are really interested in precision medicine. I was curious if you see a role for this within the women's health sphere or reproductive health, and what you’ve seen in development?

Precision medicine in reproductive health doesn't exist today, in my opinion. For example, when I look at reproductive healthcare, it's a gray area of medicine. Nobody knows why we have painful periods, why endometriosis or polyps happen. There are no guidelines in place to personalize reproductive care today. We don’t tell women to have a transvaginal ultrasound before 30 years of age or to get their AMH levels tested, which could change the course of their lives. When I had my eggs frozen, my doctors could not tell me why I must take the same drug dosage as another woman who has different hormone levels, nor could they predict the number of eggs that they would harvest.  

Our product is a platform that sits with traditional or everyday reproductive healthcare doctors, like OBGYNs, and advanced professionals, such as fertility specialists, endometriosis surgeons, perimenopause and menopause specialists. We use AI to show them trends within patient data. This helps them catch some conditions earlier, and they can triage a better next step. We also train machine learning algorithms on images of ovaries to read trends and spot early polyp growth and so on. Maybe in the future, instead of seeing a fertility specialist, you could just see a sonographer in the public health system who has our model, and they would be able to see trends within the images because our AI is assisting. That is how I see precision medicine developing in the reproductive health space.

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What has the appetite been, from a doctor’s perspective, for personalized reproductive medicine?

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For our company, we started with fertility clinics because of my personal journey. Over time, we realized that most clinics focus on fertility treatments rather than identifying the root causes of why a woman cannot conceive.

The doctors most interested in making a real difference tend to be independent practitioners. They might see patients in one setting and perform surgeries in another, taking full ownership of patient care. These are the practitioners we partner with: those who go beyond IVF and want to understand the entire picture of a woman’s health.  

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Where are the biggest gaps in data today holding back the reproductive health space?

Digitalization is relatively new. When you think about our reproductive healthcare in general, the gynecologist at the end of the day is the only doctor a woman keeps for 30 years, maybe even more. The issue right now is that when you change gynecologists, you lose all of your patient data. Or, if you see multiple independent doctors who use different systems, the data is not synchronized. That's where the problem comes when we look at digitalization. We don't even have 30 years of a woman's life on digital records.  

I really believe that data is an art. You have to label and structure data correctly for it to make sense, otherwise, you just get lost in the system. For a company, if you don’t track data properly, you lose the ability to humanize it, to organize and label it in a meaningful way. In the case of images, unstructured or unlabeled data becomes useless. Once it’s disorganized, trying to go back piece by piece to retrain an AI model is nearly impossible.

There are many factors at play, but I truly believe we’re starting to wake up to this reality. As women, we’ve realized that we’re the ones who must drive the change. If you look at the broader data ecosystem, pharmaceutical companies won’t develop new drugs without evidence on how specific conditions affect populations. These same companies help write the guidelines that governments and doctors use to treat patients. Data becomes a vicious cycle, where if there’s no evidence about how diseases affect women, there’s no basis for developing targeted treatments.  

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What developments, whether in technology, regulation, or companies, are you most excited about in women’s health over the next five years?

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I’m excited to see advancements in diagnostics for endometriosis. Right now, it’s incredibly difficult to detect, and access is limited, often requiring out-of-pocket payments. I hope to see startups that develop non-invasive tests. Perhaps using menstrual blood or other samples.

I’m also enthusiastic about the future of contraception. Many doctors I work with dislike the current options, like the pill or the coil (IUD), and there’s a strong need for safer, more effective alternatives. This applies to male contraception too, where there’s significant work to be done.

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If there’s one takeaway for readers or listeners about the future of women’s health, especially the role of better diagnostics and therapeutics through precision medicine, what would it be?

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I’d tell women to be an advocate for their health and seek comprehensive care. I’d tell practitioners in the space to think about how they can make tools like our platform work for them and impact a patient’s journey.  

From my personal experience, I had done very little in terms of reproductive health until I was 32. I was fortunate to freeze my eggs successfully, but over the past five years, my health has changed several times.  

We need to stay on top of our health. Gynecologists are often a constant presence in a woman’s life for decades, so let’s ensure women and doctors work together to improve preventative care.
 

Absolutely: knowledge is power! Thank you so much for speaking with us today.

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