To detect diseases at an early age.
AB Wire
An Indian American entrepreneur Ridhi Tariyal, co-founder of NextGen Jane, and Stephen Gire, a scientist, who met in an infectious disease lab at Harvard, have invented a smart tampon to detect diseases in women at an early stage.
Tariyal and Gire were stunned by the vast number of women’s health issues that go undetected. It seemed clear to them that there was a problem with the way that medical testing worked in women’s health, reported Fast Company.
“We had to come up with something that would allow women to find out about these conditions sooner than every year,” Tariyal was quoted as saying. “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.”
Together, Tariyal and Gire have been devising a radical new system of testing that will allow women to proactively keep track of their health by studying blood samples in the privacy of their homes. “I was thinking about how to get a large enough volume of blood to do this,” Tariyal says. “Until I realized that we actually bleed quite a bit every month.”
That’s when the lightbulb came on in Tariyal’s head: A tampon could double as a tool for collecting women’s blood. With the right technology, it could even test the blood for a range of biomarkers and send that information to a database that would allow a woman to track her reproductive health over time. It could be the most intimate wearable technology yet and a milestone in the development of the quantified self.
In 2013, Tariyal and Gire launched a startup called NextGen Jane to begin work developing a “smart tampon” and gathering information about the kinds of data women want to learn about their bodies, reported Fast Company.
They’ve been traveling around the country, gathering groups of women to discuss medical conditions they have had or are worried about, to learn how to better cater to their target consumers.
So far, they aren’t disclosing too many details about how their smart tampon will work—and anyway, before they can put a device like this on the market, they need to first develop a range of tests. Having just closed a round of seed funding led by Access Industries, they are currently conducting clinical trials to bring this testing 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,” says Tariyal, who is the company’s CEO. “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.”
NextGen Jane’s smart tampon technology, for instance, could allow women to track their anti-mullerium hormone levels so that when they faced difficult choices about whether to start a family or focus on their career, they would have that figure handy. This would allow them to have access to several data points when they are thinking about family planning.
This kind of fertility-detecting technology was perhaps less necessary in the past, when more women had children in their late teens and early twenties, the report said.
“Our framework is that your reproductive health now is something you need to manage proactively,” Tariyal says. “The time between getting your period and having children is much longer than before, which gives you many more opportunities for something to go wrong with your reproductive system.”
NextGen Jane is trying to develop a test for a biomarker in menstrual blood that might identify whether or not a woman has endometriosis. The company is currently in the midst of clinical trials for this condition, among many others that the smart tampon will ultimately test for.
It is still early days for the company, but it already has a working prototype and will have a final product in the next year or so.
“We believe that women have the capacity to understand these tests,” Tariyal says. “Women who are data-forward want to be empowered to track their own health at a granular level.”
Taruyal has an MNBA from the Harvard Business School. She has also worked at the Broad Institute, where she led an international genomics operation. The majority of her career has focused on commercializing innovations in science, medicine, and technology, with the goal of improving outcomes in healthcare. In the past few years, her areas of interest and expertise have centered on genetics in emerging markets, particularly in India and Africa, and on diagnostics that can have an impact on women’s health and fertility. With a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, she also earned a master’s degree in biomedical enterprise from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.