Bryce Richter/UW-Madison
While trying to get pregnant, UW-Madison scientist Katie Brenner knew there had to be an easier way for women to monitor their hormones. So she and her colleague invented one.
Katie Brenner knows how exasperating it can be for women who are struggling to get pregnant.
“I went through the crazy can’t-get- pregnant thing for months on end,” says Brenner, a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison. “We had the blood tests trying to figure out what was going on with my hormone levels. As a bioengineer and biochemist, I decided there must be some better way to handle this. And, in fact, there is.”
Or there will be soon, thanks to the work of Brenner and Doug Weibel, an associate professor of biochemistry. The two are developing an app to help women monitor their hormone levels through a saliva test. It’s been found to be as accurate as the blood test currently given in doctor’s offices.
“Also, you can take it every single day so you can understand what your body is doing constantly instead of getting sporadic snapshots from blood tests,” says Brennen. “That doesn’t help the woman whose cycle is irregular or abnormal.”
Brenner and Weibel’s idea is so promising that their startup — bluDiagnostics — earned a $10,000 award on June 14 in the Women Who Tech competition in San Francisco. The competition focuses on breaking down barriers for women innovators in an economy where only 7% of investor money goes to women-founded startups.
But the real winners will be the estimated 25% of American women concerned about their ability to become pregnant.
The roles of estrogen and progesterone in women’s cycles is well understood, but they are present in such low levels in saliva that until now they couldn’t be measured as accurately as they can be in blood.
It took the advent of electronics sensitive enough to detect those chemistries and smart phones to put this technology into consumers’ hands.
The app will look a lot like the basal thermometer women now use as an aid in getting pregnant. A basal thermometer can take extremely precise temperature readings, which, when plotted on a graph, can belatedly tell a woman when she has just ovulated. The new saliva-hormone test will give women four to five days advance warning.
Using the app, a woman will be able to look at all her data and compare it to population averages and her own monthly trends. She can also share the data with her physician.
Brenner, who monitored her own saliva in the lab during the course of two pregnancies while developing this study, hopes this revolutionary device will be on the market by 2018, but that goal will depend on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval process.
“We will be FDA approved, which is the real differentiator for our test,” Brenner says. “Everyone knows that women who want to get pregnant are willing to spend money, and there is a lot of quackery in this field. We want to be FDA-approved so it’s very clear to physicians that this is a trustworthy option.”
The money to make development happen is starting to roll in. With assistance from the third co-founder, Jodi Schroll, bluDiagnostics won the 2015 Governor’s Business Plan Competition last June. That competition and others have led to investments now totaling about $1.2 million.
Schroll combines a health care background with an MBA, experience in pharmaceutical marketing and consulting for bio startups. Schroll sees the prospects of bluDiagnostics expanding far beyond this initial fertility test.
“As Katie and I have developed this test, we are both amazed that there hasn’t been more work done on the role of female hormones and how they affect a woman’s body,” Schroll says. “These hormones change dramatically throughout a woman’s lifetime.”
Monitoring women’s hormones so closely could have many applications. “Research is just starting to look at how hormones may relate to certain cancers,” says Schroll. “It has taken a long time to gain recognition of how different women’s bodies are from men’s, and how differently they should be studied.”
