Smart tampon: Startup seeks to use menstrual cycle to help Dx cervical cancer

 

A new women’s medical device company, Next Gen Jane, aims to develop a “smart tampon” that can perform blood-based tests for a range of biomarkers to improve women’s health monitoring for conditions like cervical cancer, according to a new report from FastCompany.

Founders Ridhi Tariyal and Stephen Gire, who met in an infectious disease lab at Harvard, said they were driven to develop a system of testing that would allow proactive tracking of women’s health through studying in-home blood samples.

The founders said they were stunned by the number of women’s health conditions, such as endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, uterine fibroids and cervical cancer, which can go unrecognized and threaten women’s fertility, and mortality.

“We had to come up with something that would allow women to find out about these conditions sooner than every year. You can pick up a disease any time, and letting it sit there for a year until your next visit can have consequences downstream that you don’t want. The system has to change,” CEO Tariyal told FastCompany. “I was thinking about how to get a large enough volume of blood to do this. Until I realized that we actually bleed quite a bit every month.”

The smart device could also allow women to track their fertility through the hormone anti-mullerian, which serves as a molecular biomarker for the relative size of the ovarian reserve, and can be used to predict the timing of menopause.

Next Gen Jane, still in stealth mode, hasn’t uncovered many details of how their “smart tampon” will work, but told FastCompany they recently closed a round of seed funding led by Access Industries and are conducting clinical trials to bring the device to market.

“We have to get to a place where we have working, high-quality tests for enough conditions that it actually makes it worthwhile for women to test themselves every month. Our vision is to manage reproductive health from menarche to menopause. We’re thinking about all the ways that women could find data about their bodies useful,” CEO Tariyal told FastCompany.

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