Continuous At-Home Hormone Monitoring
Why We Invested in Oova
In 1967, Margaret Crane invented the at-home pregnancy test, recognizing that women wanted to learn this information quickly and privately. Now, the idea of having to go to the doctor to get a pregnancy test strikes most Americans as unimaginable.
Exactly 50 years later, in 2017, Amy Divaraniya invented the at-home hormone test that would later be called Oova. Oova enables precise, quantifiable at-home hormone monitoring through a simple urine test — instead of the standard in-clinic blood test. Oova is the only clinical grade, at-home test that displays the quantitative results, enabling patients and clinicians to see changes over time.
Until now, the only way to get detailed, clinical grade hormone data like this was through blood testing, but Oova makes it less invasive, less expensive, and more convenient with an at-home test.
Oova’s immediate impact is related to women’s health. Oova helps women gain a more precise understanding of how long their cycle is and when their fertile window happens. The conventional wisdom says that a woman’s cycle is ~28 days, and most women ovulate ~14 days in. But it turns out that there’s a lot of variance between women and a lot of variance month-to-month. Some women’s cycles are always (or occasionally) as long as 45 days or as short as 21. More precise hormone monitoring is essential to both promoting and preventing conception. More precise monitoring can also reveal fluctuations in individual hormone levels that affect the ability to conceive or sustain a pregnancy.
Empowered with this information, women can more effectively try to conceive on their own, or in collaboration with a clinician. Oova is also dramatically reducing the burden of women going through assisted reproduction. With Oova, women and their clinicians can determine when to perform procedures like artificial insemination or egg retrievals without having to travel to the clinic for daily blood draws.
As Oova expands to include estrogen in the coming months, the company will be able to deliver deeper insights into women’s experience of menopause and eventually inform treatment decisions such as when to consider therapies such as hormone replacement.
Oova’s medium-term impact will be to change how women’s healthcare and healthcare more broadly is delivered. Oova’s equal performance to the gold standard (blood testing) draws providers in; the unified patient and clinician experience keeps them around. Oova is trusted by 100+ clinics and is one of the first at-home tests that clinicians trust, from Ob/Gyns to REIs to integrative medicine practitioners. Clinicians from all these fields are beginning to integrate Oova into their clinical practices, which means they’re able to see patients’ results instantly for remote monitoring and fast intervention. Clinicians can annotate results and make recommendations that are pushed to Oova’s patient-facing app and delivered immediately — enabling a new level of real-time connection between doctors and patients.
Long-term, Oova will impact a wide range of clinical outcomes, and not only for women. There are many other conditions for which we suspect that daily or frequent hormone monitoring might be helpful. There are thousands of clinical hypotheses about the role of hormones in various conditions — from mental health to metabolic disorders to fitness and nutrition — which we’ve never been able to test cost-effectively. Oova is creating the toolkit necessary for experts to finally test these hypotheses and understand the detailed interaction between hormones, genetics, environment, lifestyle, and health.
In providing these capabilities, Oova is also building a truly unique, privacy-protected dataset of high frequency hormone data — something nobody else in the world has. Oova has already gathered a large amount of data (e.g. identifying patterns to indicate a clinical workup for polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), nuances identified in women’s hormone behavior above the age of 35, and much more). With more time and resources, it will be possible to derive new clinical insights from Oova’s dataset.
Much like Margaret Crane was the right woman with the right insights and skillset to launch the at-home pregnancy test, Amy is exactly the founder who should be running this business. She’s technical and understands the complexities of building a clinical-grade test — that’s why so many clinics have signed up to work with her. She has also personally experienced the struggles of trying to understand her own cycle while trying to conceive. Amy created Oova for the generation of women who come after her, reinventing their fertility journeys and much more.
As the company incorporates more hormones into its repertoire, Oova has the potential to expand into tens of thousands of clinical use cases. Oova is creating the toolkit we need to create new knowledge that will truly change the way we understand women’s health and health in general.
We’re excited to be on this journey with Amy and the team!
