By Gabrielle Gleeson-Solomon and Dr Nick Parkinson, Co-Founders of Tota
We didn't set out to build a testing company. We set out to help the people we love find answers.
Tota didn't start in a boardroom. It started with two people, living through the same thing at the same time, without knowing it.
One was Charlotte. A little girl who kept getting urinary tract infections she was too young to explain. Appointment after appointment, the standard tests came back clear. Years went by like that. Her father, Nick, was a scientist and he worked on DNA sequencing. Eventually he did the only thing left to try: he brought her sample into the lab and looked properly. What he found wasn't on the list the standard test had been checking for. It had been there all along, just never looked for in the right way. Once her doctor had that information, they knew what to do, and things quickly changed for the better for Charlotte.
About the same time, Gabrielle, one of our co-founders, was watching her sister, Victoria, go through something similar. Appointment after appointment. Treatment after treatment. Test after test coming back “normal”. The symptoms didn't go away but her quality of life did. Eventually, a fuller look at her vaginal and urinary microbiome gave her something concrete; a real, specific starting point she could take to her doctor, instead of another round of wait and see or being told this was just normal for her.
Neither of these women set out to become a case study. They just wanted to be listened to, to be taken seriously and for someone to look properly at their issues. And what struck Nick and Gabrielle, once they compared notes, was how common that experience is. Most vaginal and urinary tests are built around a fixed, predetermined list of organisms. If what's actually going on isn't on that list, it doesn't show up, not because it isn't there, but because nobody checked.
That's the gap Tota exists to close. We use non-targeted DNA sequencing that doesn't work from a shortlist at all. It reads every bacteria and fungi present in a sample and reports it back in plain English, so people have a fuller picture to bring into the room with their GP or specialist.
We can't promise every test finds a perfect answer. To quote Nick, “biology isn’t that straightforward”. And we're not a replacement for a doctor. What we can promise is that when you look at your microbiome with a Tota test, you're looking at a fuller picture than a predetermined list would ever show you.
Women deserve better answers and better information about their bodies. Women deserve for their symptoms to be taken seriously and to be believed. That belief is why Tota exists and it's why we built it the way we did.
Ready to see exactly how that works? Read how Tota compares to other testing methods.
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