Researchers are exploring an understudied area of women’s health: period blood.
After a wave of femtech startups popped up to offer more organic products for women during their cycles and to help track their periods and fertility, another group of startups is looking into how to actually analyze period blood to track hormones, screen for cancers, and monitor diseases such as diabetes and endometriosis, according to The Guardian.
“It is an obvious biological specimen that has been totally neglected,” said Christine Metz, who co-leads the Research Outsmarts Endometriosis (Rose) project at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health. “It is considered waste but in fact it’s a real treasure.”
Researchers say the blood contains cells and molecules that reflect what’s going on in the uterus, which can provide doctors with information that urine, saliva and blood taken from veins cannot.
NextGen Jane is one of the startups that collects women’s used tampons. Founded in 2014 by Ridhi Tariyal after she went to her doctor for a wellness visit and wanted to know more about her reproductive health, the company created an at-home sample-collection system for women who volunteer to collect and send them in for analysis.
The startup is in the process of fine-tuning a test for endometriosis, a debilitating condition that causes severe pelvic pain and heavy bleeding, and which affects about 10% of women of reproductive age, according to the World Health Organization. Lab technicians analyze DNA, RNA and proteins from the samples to detect whether women may have it.
“We leaned in,” Tariyal told The Guardian.
That’s important when much of women’s health is still underfunded because of social stigma and gender bias.
Other players looking into period blood include Theblood, a German startup founded in 2022 that is looking into creating an at-home kit to test hormone levels related to fertility as well as cycle health and perimenopause. Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland came up with a non-electronic sensor that can detect the presence of certain proteins in menstrual blood that could indicate diseases, including potentially cancer.
And Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched a $10 million “Moonshot for Menstruation Science,” a new $10 million initiative to improve understanding and treatment of endometriosis as well as other chronic inflammatory diseases that disproportionately affect women.
“This is frontier science,” Linda Griffith, director of MIT’s center for gynaepathology research and the initiative’s leader, told The Guardian.