What are the secrets of menstrual blood?

A short update on women's health innovation

Dear friends,

A few days ago, I received a letter from the NHS asking me to book my next cervical smear test appointment. Ugh. Could there be any other reaction than “Ugh”?

In England, the National Health Service (NHS) invites women for a screening every 3-5 years depending on your age, or more frequently if HPV is detected. Together with getting the HPV vaccine, this screening is the best way of preventing cervical cancer—it’s estimated to save thousands of lives every year.

And yet, 30% of women don’t attend these screenings.

Many surveys look into why women don’t attend health screenings—exploring the emotional and physical barriers that keep us from accessing care. But instead of asking questions about women, let’s question the screening itself.

You’re on your back on a cold table, some stranger inserts a speculum into your vagina and scrapes (isn’t that a great word in any healthcare context) some cells from your cervix. It’s as pleasant as it sounds. Is anyone really surprised 30% don’t attend?

Luckily, there are innovative femtech companies that have already shown how to revolutionise the smear test. Papcup, Qvin, NextGenJane and Daye are using menstrual blood as a diagnostic tool!

Instead of receiving a letter asking you to book an appointment, you could simply receive a period pad in the mail with a built-in absorbent strip that collects a sample of menstrual blood. There’d be a prepaid envelop and all you have to do is send them sample off to a lab, where it can be analsed for HPV. As simple as that.

I’m sure the 30% of young women who don’t attend would go right down to zero, if this was the new standard of care. But even though it has already been shown to work, I can’t help feeling that it will take the NHS decades to adopt a new screening regime.

HPV is not the only biomarker that can be detected in menstrual blood. Qvin has developed the Q-Pad, which can monitor biomarkers including cholesterol, inflammatory proteins, and thyroid hormones. NextGen Jane aims to screen menstrual blood for the endometriosis, which would reduce the need for it being diagnosed through laparoscopic surgery.

Photo by Alexander Sergienko on Unsplash Note: This is the only stock image I could find via Substack that has some form of representation of red blood on a pad.

For those of you who have joined this newsletter recently—welcome! And please excuse the sporadic nature of it. I’m very focused on promoting my book, The Vagina Business, while looking after my baby at the same time. (Yes, I am a bit nuts—and the baby+book combination is a topic for another time.)

I speak on lots of podcasts these days, if you’re interested you can catch me here:

• Financial Feminist, I’ve spent many years as a personal finance journalist and really admire the work Tori Dunlap does on financial education

• Uneven Distribution, where tech lawyer Denise Howell interviews ‘time travellers’ who can tell us what the future holds

• A Pair of Bookends, a really fun and bookish podcast hosted by Hannah MacDonald

• Nucleate Podcast, which focuses on biotech. I spoke to Sam Kessel, who was the first guy to invite me onto his podcast—hooray! (As you can imagine 99% of invites I get are from women.)

• Stressed But Well Dressed, very different to the other podcasts I’ve spoken on this one focused on the intersection of femtech, fashion and confidence and it was great talking to Dahlia Stroud

It’s also been absolutely wonderful talking on a panel at Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics.

From left on the panel: Ridhi Tariyal is the CEO of NextGen Jane and you can see some of the research the company has done on menstrual blood (she calls it the “menstrualome”) here and read about her in the New Yorker here.

Professor Noémie Elhadad is a world-leading researcher on endometriosis—you can read about her in chapter 11 of The Vagina Business. What’s absolutely bonkers is that when she first looked into endometriosis research she hardly found anything—besides a paper that addressed whether women with endo are more attractive (so much for research ethics).

Professor Kristin Myers created one of the first digital models of how the uterus and cervix change during pregnancy—it’s a biomechanical process after all! You can read her paper here.

Next up, I’m super excited to speak at Ladies Who Crunch and the London Girls Book Club on 22 January—what a way to start the new year! We’ll talk about femtech, well-being, fitness and the power of communities. Join us, if you’re around.

✨Wishing you a merry Christmas/ happy Chanukah/ wonderful holidays—The Vagina Business makes for a shocking yet inspiring gift, if I may say so myself ✨

Until next time,

Marina