Building the Hormone-Free Contraceptive Her Patients Couldn’t Find
The possible link between long-term use of hormonal contraception and autoimmune disease led Jennifer Johnston to build a better option for patients. Elle MD’s copper vaginal ring is a once-monthly, hormone-free contraceptive that women can use themselves, without surgery or a prescription routine.
Is there any hormone-free contraceptive that actually works? Nova Scotia-based physician Jennifer Johnston spent years at a university clinic watching patients leave without a workable answer to that question. After her MS diagnosis prompted her to look more closely at the contraceptive options available to women, she stopped waiting for someone else to build a better one. Elle MD’s copper vaginal ring is a once-monthly, hormone-free contraceptive that women can use themselves, without a procedure or a prescription routine.
A soccer game she will never forget
Jennifer Johnston was getting ready for a soccer game a number of years ago, pulling on her jersey, when she realized she couldn’t feel it on her skin. She couldn’t feel the entire left side of her body. Four days later, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disorder with no cure.
In the months that followed, Johnston started looking into what might have contributed. As a family physician, she knew how to read the research, and what she found made her look at the contraceptive options available to her patients differently. There is evolving evidence linking long-term hormonal contraceptive use to increased risk of certain autoimmune diseases, she notes, though the research is ongoing and the picture is not yet complete. Johnston calls her diagnosis a blessing in disguise. It made her healthier, pushed her to exercise daily, and sent her down a path she would not trade.
Her patients wanted something that didn’t exist
Johnston works at a university clinic, where the demand for non-hormonal contraception is constant. Young women come in having already tried hormonal options and experienced mood changes, reduced libido, or more serious health concerns. Others have simply decided hormones are not for them. She had very little to offer any of them.
Condoms have a typical-use efficacy rate of 86% and put the decision in a partner’s hands. The copper IUD works well but requires a clinical procedure, followed by the possibility of heavy, painful periods for months or years. Diaphragms are 80-90% effective, which is not good enough. Surgery is not a conversation anyone wants to have at 22. Studies suggest women are six times more satisfied with non-hormonal options than hormonal ones, and yet contraceptive research and development has spent decades iterating on hormones, because hormones already work and the investment case is established.
Elle MD’s copper vaginal ring is Johnston’s answer to that gap. The ring uses the proven spermicidal effect of copper without the invasive procedure required to deliver a copper IUD. It is designed for once-monthly use, self-inserted and removed by the user, and because it sits in the vaginal environment rather than the uterus, it is designed to avoid the heavy bleeding associated with the IUD. The team has completed proof-of-concept studies in sheep demonstrating 100% contraceptive efficacy at the highest dose tested, which was also found to be safe in the animal model. Elle MD has received $2.1 million in combined dilutive and non-dilutive funding and built collaborations with Dalhousie University, Oregon Health and Science University, and the NIH. A first-in-human safety study is the next milestone.
Building for her patients, her daughters, and herself
Johnston has four children, three of them daughters aged five, nine, and eleven. Her goal, stated plainly, is to have the ring available before her eldest needs it. She thinks about the 250 million women around the world who want access to contraception and do not yet have it, and about what it would mean to offer something low-cost, self-administered, and designed around the person using it.
“I want more people to protect themselves and live life without compromise,” she says.
She is a physician, a patient, and a mother, and she draws on all three equally. That accumulation of perspectives is what Elle MD is built from, and it is what makes her impatient with the pace of progress in women’s health research. She is not waiting for the field to catch up.
About Flashpoint POV Spotlights
Flashpoint Global produces each Founder POV Spotlight using its proprietary category leadership framework. Every Spotlight begins with a Future Narrative session, where a founder’s POV is clarified and operationalized as the lens through which new categories are built. The result is content that moves founders beyond product messaging and into the role of category leader, helping the market understand the problem, the stakes, and the future being created.
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