Gretchen Anthony hadn’t been to an OB-GYN since her six-year-old child was born. “I didn’t have any medical issues, so I didn’t feel pressure to go,” she says. “I was busy. Life just got in the way.”
When she finally went for a physical, prompted by a concerned sister, she discovered she had high grade HPV—human papillomavirus—which had caused cancer cells to grow on her cervix. The surgeon tasked with giving her a hysterectomy said that it was the worst case of cervical cancer he had ever seen. And while his team was able to arrest the cancer before it spread, the operation permanently changed the hormonal balance of her body. She sweats profusely all the time and hasn’t been able to enjoy sex since.
Anthony realizes she should have been more judicious about keeping up with her annual health check-ups, but cervical cancer is asymptomatic and many women don’t catch it early enough. In fact, there are many dangerous conditions that women don’t realize they are living with: endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, uterine fibroids—the list goes on. Without treatment, these illnesses can destroy a woman’s fertility or be fatal.
Ridhi Tariyal and Stephen Gire, an entrepreneur and a scientist, respectively, who met in an infectious disease lab at Harvard, 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. The system is fundamentally reactive, waiting for an illness to be detected before it springs into action. But when a positive test result comes back after an annual check-up, it could be too late.
“We had to come up with something that would allow women to find out about these conditions sooner than every year,” Tariyal says. “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. 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.