Good morning! Trump's attorney general nominee went before the Senate, Meta loses a lawyer over its masculinity era, and an at-home test for cervical cancer gets closer to market.
- Take-home test. In a Fortune piece about 20 innovative breakthroughs in health to watch for in 2025, my colleague Erika Fry included Teal Health. The company has indeed achieved a true innovation that is poised to solve one of women's most unpleasant health care experiences: the annual Pap smear, which screens for cervical abnormalities.
Teal Health will allow women to instead screen for cervical cancer at home using a device it calls the "Teal wand." Rather than retrieving cervical cells, Teal's process is a form of primary HPV screening that relies on vaginal cells—which means women can do it themselves. (And because of its form of screening, they only need to do it once every five years.) The company submitted to the FDA in October to offer the first approved at-home cervical cancer screening. It was given a "breakthrough device designation," which means it's on an accelerated path to approval.
Today, Fortune is the first to report, Teal Health has raised an additional $10 million to help it prepare to go to market. Emerson Collective and Forerunner led the investment, which brings Teal's total funding to $23 million. Existing investors include Serena Williams' Serena Ventures and Chelsea Clinton's Metrodora. Forerunner partner Nicole Johnson is joining Teal's board.
About one in three women in the U.S. are considered under-screened for cervical cancer. While the discomfort of the typically-used Pap smear is a secondary explanation, the primary reasons women cite for going un-screened are time and the convenience of getting to an appointment. In rural areas, deserts of OB/GYN care make it difficult for women to access screenings and are expected to get worse; in big cities where doctors are plentiful, it can still be hard to get an appointment for an annual visit as a new patient.
"We're not all getting screened, or we're getting screened, but it's in a way that's very uncomfortable, very invasive, very violating," says Teal Health CEO and cofounder Kara Egan. Egan's cofounder Avnesh Thakor, a doctor and Stanford professor, developed the first prototype of the device; Egan joined him four years ago to help make the device appealing to customers and bring it to market. The company is aiming to launch in California and to work with insurers to have its device covered in-network as a preventative screening; Egan is also leading conversations with health systems and employers to reach more patients.
Egan argues that the market for this kind of health innovation has been misunderstood—assumed to be the one in three women who go unscreened. But even if women going un-screened are the first target, the market should be "all women who deserve a better experience," she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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