No more peeing on a stick: New saliva-based pregnancy test now available in Israel
After launching Salistick in the UK, Ireland and Sweden last year, Israeli company Salignostics is selling the product at home and eyeing the US market
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Thanks to a new Israeli-developed product, women don’t have to pee on a stick anymore to find out whether they’re pregnant — their saliva is enough to indicate if they are expecting a baby.
Available in the UK, Ireland, and Sweden since mid-2023, the first-of-its-kind home saliva-based pregnancy test began appearing earlier this month on shelves at Super-Pharm, Israel’s largest drugstore chain. The rapid test, called Salistick, also recently became available in Norway.
Salignostics, the Jerusalem-based company that developed Salistick, believes that women will soon prefer its saliva test to the conventional urine ones.
“Based on our market research and customer feedback, we see that there are three main advantages to Salistick over urine tests,” said Guy Krief, company co-founder, deputy chief executive officer, and chief businesses development officer.
“First, it’s a much easier user experience. Second, you can do it sanitarily and freely anywhere, anytime. You’re not obligated to go to a specific place or to wait for the urge to urinate. Third, you can do the test with the people that you would like to share the moment with,” he said.
A video ad letting Israelis know that Salistick is now available at Super-Pharm shows a woman (played by actor Alina Levy) excited to know whether she is pregnant. Having discovered Salistick, she peruses the store aisles with the test in her mouth. She has happy results within minutes and shares them with her husband, who has just joined her after finding parking.
Krief told The Times of Israel that Salistick operates based on lateral flow assay technology. The technology identifies biomarkers in blood, urine, saliva, or vaginal secretions. Used for clinical and public health purposes, lateral flow assay tests are now simple to manufacture and use as a result of their ubiquity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Indeed, Salistick uses the same technology used in rapid COVID tests and urine home pregnancy tests,” Krief noted.
What sets Salistick apart is its unique core technology that enables the human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) hormone to be detected at a 96 percent accuracy rate in saliva.
Human chorionic gonadotrophin, known as “the pregnancy hormone,” is produced by the placenta and helps thicken the uterine walls as a fertilized egg develops into an embryo and then a fetus. The hormone is at its highest level at the end of the first trimester of pregnancy but can be detected as early as 10 to 11 days after conception.
Traditionally, hCG was detected in blood and urine. With Salistick, it can now be detected in saliva as early as the day a woman misses her period.
“Our technology qualifies saliva to detect the hCG. We had to figure out how to process the saliva in a way to overcome the obstacles that it poses in detecting this biomarker. Our platform transforms saliva to a perfectly valid fluid, which the lateral flow assay can be used with,” Krief said.
Krief said he is confident that saliva will become “the gold standard and the holy grail of diagnostics.” He admitted, however, that figuring out how to successfully use saliva has been challenging.
“A saliva pregnancy test was not commercially available before now because it is not trivial to transform saliva so that it is reliable. For example, if I took saliva from you now, it would not be the same as if I took it from you two hours ago. It’s a different body fluid [from moment to moment]. It has a different viscosity and different concentrations of protein, salt, and sugars,” Krief said.
“You cannot [easily] establish a reliable diagnostic assay with these kinds of characteristics. And this is only one of dozens of problems we faced. But once you crack it, you can capture any biomarker that you define,” he added.
According to Krief, saliva is not only easier and more comfortable to collect than blood or urine for diagnostic testing; it is also what he refers to as “the mirror of the body.”
“This is well-accepted in the scientific community. Saliva is considered to be the second-most important body fluid after blood. It has a big overlap with blood. It possesses more than 5,000 proteins and is the gateway to the body in terms of viral and bacterial infections.
“If you have an infectious disease, your saliva will reflect it,” he added.
Accordingly, Salignostics is set to expand its product offerings. In addition to its pregnancy test, it already offers a saliva-based COVID rapid test called SaliCov. It is currently working on developing one for streptococcus (strep) infections, which would save having to do an uncomfortable throat swab to confirm that a sore throat is caused by the bacteria.
With Time magazine having named Salistick one of the 200 Best Inventions of 2023, Salignostics is working to get approval for the novel product from the US Food and Drug Administration.
While the company first launched Salistick in the UK, Ireland, and Sweden because of the willingness of retailers and customers in those countries to try new products, it is now seeking to branch out to the US. Finding a major partner would help take Salistick’s manufacturing beyond the capacity of the company’s factory in northern Israel and increase its chances of breaking into the world’s largest market.
“We definitely are in progress to position the product in the US,” Krief confirmed.
