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Tampons Are Becoming a Valuable Medical Tool
Sometimes the most consequential innovations are fueled by frustration. When she was in her early thirties, Ridhi Tariyal asked her gynecologist for a fertility test. Her doctor dismissed the request, saying such a test wasn’t possible. Tariyal knew otherwise. With an MBA from Harvard and a Master of Science in biomedical enterprise from MIT, she was familiar with the Anti-Müllerian Hormone, an established marker of ovarian reserve. The test existed. Still, her doctor would not order it.
The experience left her frustrated enough to turn her own health into a science project. “There are thousands of women like me,” Tariyal, now 45, says. “Women are waiting longer to have children, but they still want information about their reproductive health.”
Ridhi Tariyal was inspired by her own frustration to explore better ways for women to learn about their fertility. Courtesy of NextGen Jane
Regular fertility tests require blood samples, so that raised an obvious question: Where could women collect blood easily and repeatedly without a clinic visit?
The answer, she realized, was hiding in plain sight. Every month, billions of women discard biological material containing blood, immune cells, bacteria and fragments of tissue shed from the uterine lining. According to Taryal, over 800 genes are expressed differently in menstrual effluence and venous blood. Yet, she notes, “We throw all this valuable information into the trash.” What if menstrual blood could reveal fertility, detect disease and provide a window into women’s health, all without invasive procedures?
Together with biologist Stephen Gire, she founded NextGen Jane in 2014. The company developed and patented methods for collecting and processing blood samples from tampons. Instead of throwing them away, women seal the tampons in a specially designed collection kit and mail them to the company’s laboratory.
In her lab in Oakland, California, Tariyal dons a white coat over her t-shirt and jeans and demonstrates how easy the extraction is: The patented machine, smaller than an espresso machine, accomplishes the task of retrieving a viable blood sample in seconds. “What’s really cool is we’re getting a biopsy without a speculum or stirrups or any sort of scraping. We’re using the body’s natural expelling of reproductive tissue,” Tariyal emphasizes.
NextGen Jane has now identified a biomarker panel for endometriosis and validated it in an independent patient cohort. Tariyal claims an accuracy rate over 90 percent. Endometriosis affects roughly one in 10 women of reproductive age. On average, it takes a woman in the U.S. seven to 10 years from her first recognized symptoms until she finds out she has the painful disease, and confirming the diagnosis typically requires surgery under general anesthesia.
NextGen Jane is currently conducting an additional infertility-focused study designed to evaluate how the test performs in patients struggling to conceive.
The idea Tariyal pursued has evolved from a provocative startup pitch into a growing scientific field. Today, academic centers, hospitals and biotechnology companies across the United States are investigating the question: Could menstrual blood become one of medicine’s most valuable diagnostic tools?
“The space is vibrant,” Tariyal says. “People have bought into the premise that there is something really useful in menstrual blood.”
Smaller than an espresso machine, the patented machine can retrieve a viable blood sample in seconds. Courtesy of NextGen Jane
Researchers at Stanford Health Care have demonstrated that menstrual blood can be used to detect high-risk strains of human papillomavirus (HPV), the virus responsible for most cervical cancers. The peer-reviewed study suggests that period blood could provide a less invasive screening option.
Also in Northern California, entrepreneur Sara Naseri’s company Qvin (after kvinde, the Danish word for woman) has developed a menstrual pad that collects dried blood samples for laboratory testing. In 2024, the FDA cleared the use of the pad for monitoring hemoglobin A1c — a key marker used to manage diabetes.
On Long Island, the ROSE (Research OutSmarts Endometriosis) trial at Northwell Health’s Robert S. Boas Center for Genomics and Human Genetics has spent more than a decade developing a nonsurgical diagnostic test for endometriosis using menstrual cups.
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And after 10 years of development, Abbott, the multinational medical device company, just released a self-collected tampon PCR test for endometrial cancer. “Women from certain ethnic communities are uncomfortable with the pap smear procedure for cultural reasons,” Tariyal explains. “Often these are the very communities that are underserved and have the highest rates of cervical cancer. At-home tests can open new vistas that you wouldn’t have thought of before.”
What was once a fringe idea has become a growing ecosystem. Why did nobody think of this earlier? Perhaps it’s because most inventors and investors — still — are overwhelmingly male. Tariyal has an array of stories about her efforts to sell her tampon machine to a room full of suits. “One said this only helps half of the population,” she recounts with a half-smile and an eye roll. Another asked if the tests could be adjusted so that men could test their sexual partners for STDs.
“People have bought into the premise that there is something really useful in menstrual blood,” says Tariyal. Courtesy of NextGen Jane
Despite these roadblocks, Harvard University supported Tariyal’s efforts by paying for the first clinical trial and patent lawyers. But the first patents were only the beginning.
The science has progressed faster than the business model. “We’re really excited about the data we have for endometriosis diagnosis,” she says. “But it’ll be a longer path to actually bringing that product into market.” The challenge, she argues, is not science, but economics: “Diagnostics is a field that’s hard to fund.”
Perhaps the most surprising development at NextGen Jane is that the company no longer sees diagnosis as its ultimate goal. Over the past several years, researchers have collected more than 2,000 menstrual samples from hundreds of participants, creating what Tariyal calls a “menstrual library” containing extensive genomic, microbiome and clinical data.
The original purpose was to identify disease markers. But the team began noticing something else. “Menstruation is a really unique event in female biology,” Tariyal says. “It is a controlled inflammatory event.” Every month, the body breaks down tissue, clears away cellular debris and rebuilds the uterine lining — remarkably, without leaving scars.
“How can the body know how to heal with no fibrosis, no scabbing?” Tariyal asks. “Our bodies do it hundreds of times in our lifetime.”
That observation has transformed the company’s ambitions. Using genomic sequencing, NextGen Jane researchers have begun mapping the transition from tissue breakdown to tissue repair. They now apply the resulting framework to diseases beyond reproductive health, including lupus, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
Tariyal’s theory is that many chronic inflammatory diseases represent systems that become stuck somewhere along the path between inflammation and healing. Menstruation, by contrast, may offer a natural blueprint for how healthy tissue repair is supposed to work.
“Our ambitions increased,” Tariyal says. “We started out wanting to bring better diagnostics to market. But if there’s no therapy that actually helps people resolve these chronic conditions, you can do better. You can actually help understand the disease biology to bring better drugs to market.”
Jaina Jogia coordinates clinical research for NextGen Jane. Courtesy of NextGen Jane
In other words, menstrual blood may prove valuable not simply because it can diagnose disease, but because it can help scientists understand healing.
Part of the promise lies in the fact that menstrual blood is more than just blood. “You’re actually getting shedding of endometrial lining,” Tariyal explains. That means researchers gain access to multiple cell types, including immune and precancerous cells that are absent from standard blood draws. Together, these components provide a richer picture of what is happening inside the body. “Menstrual blood gives you not just systemic immune responses,” Tariyal says. “It gives you tissue-resident immune response.”
A decade ago, researchers were debating whether menstrual blood had any medical value at all. “There was no literature about menstrual blood when we started,” Tariyal recalls. “We had to create the building blocks from scratch, create a standardized collection kit, etc.” Today, the debate has shifted to which conditions it can detect, how accurately it can do so and how quickly health care systems will adapt.
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Tariyal’s personal story has evolved, too. When she launched NextGen Jane, she was trying to answer questions about her own fertility. Now she is a mother of two. During our interview, she balances discussion of genomics with carrying her two-month-old son in a baby sling.
The woman who built a company because she couldn’t get straightforward answers about her reproductive health has become both a mother and a leading figure in a rapidly developing area of medical research. For her, the story came full circle. For the science, it may only be the beginning.
The post Tampons Are Becoming a Valuable Medical Tool appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.