Somewhere in the US a woman on her period pulled out her dripping, saturated tampon. But instead of wrapping it in toilet paper and tossing it into a bin, she put the tampon in a special plastic sample container, screwed the lid on tight and mailed it to an address in Oakland, California.
The address was that of NextGen Jane (NGJ), a Bay Area-based startup founded in 2014. And now Julia Carr, NGJ’s clinical research coordinator, stands in the company’s lab under a fume hood happily decanting a mixture of the woman’s blood and a preservation solution into a test tube. She will go on to pipette out small amounts to freeze and store for later analysis. NGJ has obtained about 2,500 menstrual blood samples this way – from women volunteering to send in their used tampons – for its research. That Carr is dealing with their period blood does not gross her out in the slightest. “This is a beautiful project for women’s science, and we are exploring a novel sample type,” she says.
