Mount Sinai Health System spinout OOVA has joined forces with Thorne Research, a supplement and at-home health test business, to pilot its fertility monitoring tool.
As part of the partnership, OOVA’s tool will be available to more than 3 million potential customers and 35,000 clinicians through bundled sales with Thorne supplements.
The OOVA at-home offering, which combines biotechnology and machine learning, allows women to measure and monitor two fertility markers: luteinizing hormone and progesterone.
It works like this: A user provides a urine sample, and the amount of key hormones are measured through a paper-based test strip. Using the OOVA app and their smartphone camera, the consumer can then scan the test. With the assistance of AI, the user then gets her results.
The offering can track daily hormone levels to predict peak fertility, as well as monitor changes over time and offer recommendations. Additionally, OOVA’s technology can serve as a detection tool for cycle management, post-pregnancy menstrual assessment and pre-menopause.
“Our main mission is to help women and families by creating a brand of trust,” OOVA co-founder and CEO Aparna (Amy) Divaraniya said in a statement. “Women’s bodies shouldn’t be a black box. Our technology gives women the means to take control of their health.”
The New York City-based diagnostic device company was founded in 2017, and its team consists of individuals from the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine.
OOVA isn’t the only company out of Mount Sinai.
In 2017, the health system launched Sema4, a for-profit startup that relies on genomic and clinical data to better diagnose, treat and prevent diseases. Pronounced “semaphore,” the company was created from numerous parts of Mount Sinai’s Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology.
Back in 2016, Mount Sinai and Icahn School of Medicine debuted RxUniverse, a platform for prescribing apps. Sinai AppLab and Mount Sinai Innovation Partners also launched Responsive Health to license the technology to other healthcare providers. In September 2017, Responsive Health officially rebranded to Rx.Health. The startup raised a $1.8 million seed round last year.
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