Harvard researchers think the blood could be a useful source of health information for women.

Nancy Crotti

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Ridhi Tariyal was at a crossroads in her life. The Harvard researcher had just completed work on a long-term project. At 33, she had begun to wonder whether and when to have children, and if she even could.

Tariyal wanted answers that her body already had, but the medical establishment wasn't prepared to give it to her. A physician refused to test her fertility, in part because her insurer would not pay unless she had tried and failed to conceive.

"It was clear to me then that our health care system was a reactive paradigm. If you don't have a clear-cut problem, doctors don't really know what to do with you or what to tell you," Tariyal said in a Harvard news release."I really thought women should have information that's theirs--without going to a doctor and without having a random arbiter decide whether they were ready to have this data."

She also wanted to make it easier for women to gather information about threats to their fertility: conditions such as polycystic ovarian syndrome, ovarian cancer, uterine fibroids, and treatable infections, including chlamydia and gonorrhea.

Blood was the best source of that information, and lots of it. A life-sciences fellow at Harvard, Tariyal had a brainstorm: a "smart" tampon that could detect the warning signs of these threats to fertility and many other conditions.

With a background in industrial engineering, biomedical enterprise and business, Tariyal and a former field-research colleague, Stephen Gire, developed and patented a technology to capture menstrual flow and convert it into medical samples. They founded a company, NextGen Jane, to further develop the technology and market it.

Tariyal and Gire are working with a leading endometriosis clinic in the San Francisco Bay area to conduct a clinical trial using donated samples of tampons used by healthy women, according to a report in the New York Times.

The Times report gives an overview of the challenges Tariyal and Gire faced. Theyhad trouble raising money until they decided to mine menstrual flow for all of its components--blood and cells shed by the ovaries and uterus. They could extract all of this and use genomics to detect cancer and reproductive diseases in these cells. They landed funding from Illumina and from venture- capital company Access Industries.

All that, from something that women routinely discard. Said Tariyal, "Something that you would otherwise throw away can actually push science further."

Nancy Crotti is a contributor to Qmed and MPMN.

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