A new health platform hopes to make women’s health easier to navigate — and cut down on the years it can take to get a diagnosis.
“Women just keep telling us, I want answers, and I want to know what to do next. And right now, they just feel like their care is fragmented,” Xella Health co-founder and CEO Kelly Lacob told The Post. “They really want someone who can tell them the full picture and kind of be that quarterback who facilitates care between the different parties.”
With a blood sample, Xella Health — which launches today — screens for 130+ diseases that might be missed by doctors.
And later this year, they plan to introduce a “menstrual fluid” test for conditions like endometriosis.
How does Xella work?
After signing up, users fill out a questionnaire about symptoms, history, family history and lifestyle, Lacob said. That’s followed by a blood draw with Quest or Labcorp, or they’ll even send a mobile phlebotomist to your house.
They take quite a bit of blood: around 80 mL, or 14 to 17 vials — more than a typical blood draw, but less than a blood donation (around 500 mL).
Xella then calculates the probability that someone has a number of conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women, including endometriosis, PMOS (formerly called PCOS), fibroids, early menopause, hypothyroidism, Lyme disease and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD).
What it doesn’t give is a diagnosis. But the data can help land on a diagnosis, Lacob said, which could be a huge benefit for the many women who take many years to get diagnosed — during which time their condition gets worse.
This can be particularly useful to women who are looking into their fertility, on the cusp of menopause, or dealing with chronic gynecologic symptoms like bleeding and pain, they said.
“These are the women who have been seeking answers for a long time and not getting answers,” Lacob said. Often, she said, “these conditions are misdiagnosed or delayed … for years.”
This is because awareness about many women’s health conditions is poor, but improving, and specialists are often needed to identify them, Lacob said.
Xella’s screening combines biomarkers from the blood and clinical data about the patient — a mix genetics and epigenetics.
“We are looking at multiple layers of your biology all at the same time,” Lacob said.
“All of those factors kind of come together to say … OK, you do have some of the patterns consistent with endometriosis, but our confidence level is medium or high,” Lacob said, as an example.
It can confirm whether a woman is in perimenopause, or the transition into menopause, and what that means for bone brain, and heart health based on where she is within that period. Perimenopause can last between a few months to 8 years.
Lacob said women can also screen for high-risk HPV.
After you get your results, Xella offers more information about conditions you might be at risk for, as well as next steps you can take.
Lacob recommends women get the screening done annually, and over time, Xella can better detect changes like perimenopause.
This starts at $499 a screening, with add-ons that look at fertility or perimenopause. For now, this is not covered by insurance, but it’s HSA, FSA eligible. They are also not available in New York and New Jersey.
The next frontier: Menstrual blood
Xella is also working on a new way to get better insight into women’s health, likely to launch later this year.
“When you look at menstrual fluid, you can see biomarkers that are stressed sooner and in higher concentrations, and you actually get bits of reproductive tissue in that sample,” Lacob said. “And so with that, we’ve been developing a proprietary endometriosis detection test.”
Endometriosis is a chronic condition where tissue grows outside of the uterus. This can cause severe pain and bleeding. Because of a lack of symptoms specific to the disease, it often takes a long time to get a diagnosis.
Beyond helping to identify the disease, the test can help identify fertility outcomes like miscarriage rates, or failure to implant.
Xella also hopes to offer vaginal swabs to assess the vaginal microbiome, and improve screening to look at fertility.
