Portada

SHEscience – Women's Health Research Platform

Inspiration

I have endometriosis. For years, I searched for reliable information about my own condition and found scattered data, inaccessible medical jargon, and silence. I was told the pain was normal. That I had to endure it.

It took me years to understand that silence was not just mine — it was the result of decades of medical research that never considered women like me.

The numbers confirm it: endometriosis takes an average of 7 to 10 years to be diagnosed. Women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack. 80% of historical clinical trials were conducted exclusively on men. Less than 5% of medical research in Latin America includes a gender perspective.

SHEscience was born on March 8th as a direct response to that silence. Not as a symbolic gesture, but as a functional tool — because the best way to honor International Women's Day is to build something that makes a real difference.

The idea was first developed and presented in the Mujeres 360 program in 2025, where it was selected as a winning project. That validation confirmed what I already knew from living with endometriosis: this is not a niche problem. It is a systemic one, and it deserves a real solution. SheShips is the next step — turning a validated concept into a working product.

What It Does

SHEscience is a digital platform that centralizes scientific research on women's health, with two distinct experiences built on the same interface.

Women's Mode provides educational, empathetic, evidence-based information about symptoms, conditions, and reproductive health. It includes a real-time symptom search, detailed condition pages with scientific context, and practical tools to prepare for medical appointments — all without diagnoses or alarmism.

Professional Mode serves as a centralized scientific repository for doctors, researchers, and students. It offers advanced filters by pathology, study type, region, and year, alongside a curated directory of grants and funding opportunities for women's health research.

Both modes are accessible through a single toggle in the navigation bar. The same platform. Two experiences. One mission.

How I Built It

SHEscience was built in 48 hours using the following stack:

Lovable — for rapid full-stack development (React + Supabase integration)
Supabase — PostgreSQL database for storing studies, opportunities, and user subscriptions
Make — automation platform with four configured workflows:
- Weekly scraping of new studies from the PubMed API (NCBI)
- Detection of new grants via institutional RSS feeds (WHO, Wellcome Trust, CONICET)
- Automatic generation of accessible Spanish-language summaries using the Claude API
- Weekly email alerts to subscribed users based on their tracked conditions
Claude API by Anthropic — for generating two versions of each study summary: one technical (Professional Mode) and one empathetic and jargon-free (Women's Mode)
PubMed API (NCBI) — as the primary source for peer-reviewed research on women's health conditions

The design system is intentional: an editorial aesthetic with a dusty rose palette and Poppins typography — professional and scientific, but warm enough to make women feel the platform was built for them.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was scope. The problem SHEscience addresses is enormous — centuries of medical bias cannot be undone in 48 hours — so the hardest decision was defining what a meaningful, functional MVP looks like within that constraint.

A second challenge was tone. Building a platform that serves both a gynecologist reviewing clinical trials and a 19-year-old trying to understand why her pain keeps being dismissed requires two completely different voices, vocabularies, and levels of information density — all within the same product. Getting that balance right took multiple iterations.

Finally, building from Bolivia added a layer of complexity: most existing research infrastructure is designed for North American or European contexts. Making SHEscience relevant for Latin American users — where local data is scarce and research funding is even scarcer — required deliberate design decisions at every step.

What I Learned

I learned that the most impactful products are often born from personal frustration. The clarity of the problem I was solving — because I live it — made every design and product decision easier to justify.

I also learned that accessibility and rigor are not opposites. SHEscience proves that a platform can be scientifically serious and emotionally intelligent at the same time.

What's Next

Phase 1 — Bolivia: Partnerships with local universities, hospitals, and NGOs to populate the platform with Latin American research and connect with the local medical community.

Phase 2 — Latin America: Regional expansion with country-specific data, Spanish-language research, and a growing network of researchers and healthcare professionals.

Phase 3 — Global: An English version to connect with the international scientific community and position SHEscience as the global reference for women's health research.

The roadmap also includes open access to anonymized symptom data to help identify diagnostic gaps — turning the platform into not just a repository, but a research tool in itself.

SHEscience is not a hackathon idea. It is a project with a proven track record, built by someone who lives the problem every day, and now finally shipped as a real product.

SHEscience — Because science must also study the female body.