These Startups Want You to Send Them Your Period Blood

The kit arrives in your mailbox in a cardboard box stamped with a modern, serif-font logo. It’s the kind of sleek, clean design so often associated with direct-to-consumer brands that fill your social media feeds with ads. A hip makeup line could easily be inside, or a set of razors with a cutesy name.

Instead, you open the box and find a pair of gloves, a specimen collection jar, and an organic cotton tampon.

NextGen Jane, a health tech startup founded in 2014, sends these kits to menstruators who volunteer to participate in one of the company’s clinical studies. Users wear the tampon for a specified amount of time before removing it and depositing it into the collection jar. Once the jar is sealed, a solution in the container activates to keep the sample’s DNA and RNA intact in ambient temperatures for up to two weeks. Users pack the jar in a supplied, self-addressed box, and drop it in the mail to be sent to NextGen Jane’s lab in Oakland, California for analysis.

Read more at The Daily Beast.