You’ll soon be able to flush away fears of your pregnancy test being discovered.
Lia, a startup from Philadelphia, has gotten clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to sell its flushable pregnancy test on the market.
The product is the first and only FDA cleared flushable, biodegradable pregnancy test.
The test has no glass or plastic and requires no batteries. It is made with a special paper that works long enough to take the test, but then degrades in water. Just like plastic pregnancy tests, the Lia tests will react to the pregnancy hormone found in urine, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), displaying two lines to indicate pregnancy, one line if not.
Lia was founded in 2015 by Bethany Edwards and Anna Simpson, based on graduate research done by Edwards in Integrated Product Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
The two UPenn grads wanted to innovate home pregnancy tests, which haven’t changed in decades.
“It’s been the same stick test since 1987, and that’s kind of crazy,” Edwards said at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Berlin 2017 last week. The two creators won the Disrupt Cup at the Berlin conference, bringing home $50,000 in prize money.
The company says the product was 99% accurate in advance tests and it’s expected to hit the market in mid-2018.
When it becomes available on Lia’s website and Amazon, the test could cost anywhere between $9 and $22. Those who want to support the new product now can donate $10 for tests to be provided to organizations like Planned Parenthood, Whitman-Walker Health, PreserveFertility.org and other organizations.
Edwards is hoping this is the beginning of a wave of sustainable, flushable tests.
“What we’ve done here is essentially creating a new category of water-dispersable, biodegradable diagnostics,” she said at TechCrunchDisrupt. “This is just the start for us.”
