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IElina Berglund, a 35-year-old pregnant particle physicist, explains how she inadvertently pbaded from advanced scientific discovery to the front line of birth control.
In the spring of 2012, the Swedish scientist was working in Geneva, at Cern, where she was part of the team looking for the Higgs boson particle (the discovery would later win the Nobel Prize). It was then that she started looking for a natural alternative to hormonal contraceptives.
By pointing to the three small scars on the upper arm from where his implant has been sitting for 10 years, Berglund remembers not wanting to get another one. "I thought," Okay, I want to have kids in a few years, so what can I do to fill that gap? I thought it might be time to let my body start ovulating and coming back. to normal before I wanted to get pregnant. "
To circumvent the implant while controlling its fertility, she built an algorithm that badyzed each day her lowest resting temperature to determine whether or not she could become pregnant (basal body temperature increases after ovulation ). Soon, his colleagues wanted to try it.
On her honeymoon, her husband, Raoul Scherwitzl, also a physicist, suggested turning the algorithm into an application. She quickly saw the call: "I could see that so many women would benefit." Today, their application, Natural Cycles, has over a million registered users in the world, with an investment of 37.5 million dollars and employs 95 people worldwide. It is the first certified contraceptive application in Europe and is authorized by the FDA to be marketed as a contraceptive in the United States, where it was officially launched in March for $ 9.99 per month.
At the age of nine months, pregnant with her second child, Berglund explains that the application has worked successfully for her both as a contraceptive and as a mother. "I am a person who really likes to plan and optimize. I like to say exactly what month I want to get pregnant.
The Natural Cycles application, which was reviewed last year. Photography: Danijela Froki / Natural Cycles
As a contraceptive, the application claims to be 93% effective with a "typical use" and 98% with "perfect use". According to Planned Parenthood figures, this corresponds to 85% of typical cases and 98% of perfect cases for condoms, or to 91% of typical cases and 99% of pills.
But last year, the effectiveness of Natural Cycles was examined by the public.
In January 2018, the Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA) conducted a widely publicized investigation after the Södersjukhuset Hospital in Stockholm reported that 37 users of Natural Cycles had undergone an abortion during the year. a period of four months. The MPA then confirmed that the pregnancies were in fact consistent with the product's failure rate, but asked the company to "clarify the risk of unwanted pregnancies" in the instructions and app.
In retrospect, Berglund said that it was "not so strange that they rang the alarm because it was 37 pregnancies out of 668 and of course, it was There was a new product … However, what was a little strange, it is that they also came out with a press release it. She also said that their decision to include typical use failures was unusual.
In August, the British Advertising Standards Authority ruled that a Facebook ad published in 2017 for Natural Cycles, including the terms "extremely accurate" and "clinically tested," was misleading. Berglund admits it was a mistake: "It makes no sense to talk about accuracy in contraception, you talk about efficiency, so I think they're absolutely right about it."
When I ask her how she personally deals with the unwanted pregnancies of the users, she seems truly touched. "It's really the disadvantage of contraception: it will never succeed 100%, so there will always be these failure rates. And these 37 women is not the first time I'm dealing with an unwanted pregnancy of Natural Cycles. We try to do a monthly follow-up with our users and I … "she takes a deep breath.
Through an expiration, she continues: "It's always very difficult. You want to do something good and then you have a woman who contacts you because it failed for her, it's very hard. "
Users are encouraged to check their temperature at least five days a week upon waking up and to enter their information into the app to find out if they are on a "green" (non-fertile) or "red" day "(Fertile). . It also has a "plan a pregnancy" mode.
According to Berglund, the most common reason for unwanted pregnancies is that people do not use protection on red days. If people used it perfectly and only on green days, the failure rate would be 0.5% (the 98% efficiency rate "perfect use" allows for the l & # 39; condom failure). The reason she is not 100% effective, she says, is that sometimes the body suddenly ovulates early or there is a rise in temperature that looks like ovulation but is not. not.
"My dream is if we could have a flea in the body that measures all hormones directly," she says with a bit of optimism. Although this is almost possible at the university level, she says, this is by no means imminent from the consumer's point of view.
For now, however, she focuses on the United States, where she plans to learn from their experiences in Europe. Berglund and her husband moved from Stockholm to New York in September. So far, the response has been positive – from the medical community and users. But of course, birth control in the United States has its own unique policy.
Health care for women in America is a key political battleground for the Trump administration. He recently announced that he would prevent organizations sponsoring abortions from receiving government funding and attempted to restrict access to contraception.
"As a European scientist, I am of course more in favor of giving women as many choices as possible and letting them choose. I think it's more the right thing to do, "says Berglund, who says he is pro-choice.
But with Natural Cycles already working with Title X – a government program that funds reproductive health care for low-income Americans – to give free access to underprivileged women in New Hampshire, it seems like Berglund has the # 1 The intention to be caught up in politics is inevitable.
How would she feel if her app was used by the Trump administration to enfranchise women by restricting access to other birth control methods? "Well, I have not seen it yet. If that were the case, I would obviously fight that. But not yet. According to her, the company does not share personal data.
Berglund says many pharmaceutical companies are cutting funding for women's health. She hopes that the burgeoning femtech industry (estimated at $ 50 billion by 2025) will be able to step in to fill it with more products designed by and for women.
And what about birth control solutions for men? Berglund plans to stick to women's health at the moment, but hopes to see more options for men in the future. Men, she said, have withstood most of the side effects of hormonal contraception found in studies, which does not encourage research.
"I think it's very sad because, you know … why do we have to deal with it?"
After working in two predominantly male-dominated industries, physics and technology, Berglund said he had the chance to work with women (the staff at Natural Cycles is 65% women and 35% men. ) the circumstances could be as simple as reframing it. Women, she says, are often more interested in programming as a means to an end, while men are more often interested in the technology itself.
Her four-year-old daughter Alba is already interested in nature and the universe. Berglund tells her that she could start teaching her coding at the age of five.
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