ON A WEDNESDAY in early March, a lab scientist named Carlo removed a paper strip containing a dried blood sample from a plastic envelope. He inserted it into a contraption resembling a large hole punch, and I watched as a small wine-colored disc dropped into a test tube. Next, he added a buffering solution and fed the tube into a chemistry analyzer, a machine resembling a short tanning booth that scanned the sample for a glucose level indicator.
Neither the futuristic machines nor the test itself was uncommon. What was unusual, surprising, maybe even revolutionary, was that the substance he was examining was not blood from a vein or a finger prick, but from menstruation.
I had traveled to the Silicon Valley headquarters of a startup called Qvin, pronounced “kwin,” derived from the Danish word meaning “woman.” Since receiving clearance from the FDA in January, Qvin has begun selling a new menstrual pad that it says will help people tap into the “power in your period.” Rather than undergo a blood draw, a woman (and anyone who menstruates, but for this story, I will sometimes refer to women because they dominate the group that does) can stick the $49 Q-Pad, as it’s called, in her underwear during her monthly flow. She then pulls out a test strip, which will have dried the blood and primed it for transport.
Currently, Qvin’s lab analyzes the sample only for its average blood sugar level, a biomarker (essentially, a signal of a disease or condition) used to diagnose two types of diabetes. The company says that soon it hopes to offer other tests in the United States, including for HPV—the virus responsible for 95 percent of cervical cancers—and for fertility hormones.
Qvin is part of a small but growing wave of companies and research initiatives doing something that science and medicine have neglected for thousands of years: treating menstrual blood not as a waste product, but as an important trove of information about the bodies it comes from. I’d become especially interested in the new science of periods after a baffling diagnosis left me grasping for more details about my reproductive organs and wishing medicine had more answers to give.
“Period blood is the most overlooked opportunity in medical research,” Qvin co-founder Dr. Sara Naseri likes to say. Collecting it is noninvasive. And data hidden in its cells might help scientists crack the code to some of the most cryptic reproductive ailments.
One of those is endometriosis, wherein tissue of the type that
