Researchers developing ‘smart’ tampons

Two US academics are researching the concept of tampons that could detect warning signs of illness in menstrual blood

Reported in the Harvard Gazette, NextGen Jane is a startup founded by former university colleagues Ridhi Tariyal and Stephen Gyre.

The two researchers will reportedly enter a clinical trial this year. They’ll use donated menstrual blood to see how it could be used to detect endometriosis, which affects 1 in 10 women of reproductive age in the UK.

“The amazing thing about the ‘quantified self’ is that it’s talked about,” said Gire in an interview with the newspaper. “If you can do that with reproductive health and get it to the point where people talk about it at work or over cocktails, then it reduces the stigma, allowing women to be more proactive.”

The concept came about in 2013, when Tariyal was 33 and felt she was at a ‘transition point’, according to the Harvard Gazette.

“It’s hard to understand what to do if you don’t have kids, and you’re still pursuing a career,” she told the paper. “There aren’t actually really clear guideposts. How should you make a decision about having a child? How should you make a decision about freezing your eggs? When? What information can anyone tell me about whether I should drop everything and have a kid now or wait two more years?”

Having been denied fertility testing (in part because insurance wouldn’t cover the costs unless she tried and failed to conceive), Tariyal joined Harvard’s Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship, an accelerator scheme for Harvard alumni looking to commercialise their innovations.

Sequencing firm Illumina offered a grant which allowed Tariyal and Gire to learn more about blood diagnostics: “We saw an explosion of differentially regulated genes that correlated to known hormonal shifts in the menstrual cycle,” said Gire.

The first clinical trial begins this year, and the pair hope to be able to develop a system that allows women to manage their own health using data hitherto unavailable except via a doctor.