The Journey From an Innovative Concept to a Times 2025 Best New Invention
In 2017, Dr. Avnesh Thakor was presenting his health technology innovation as part of the Stanford Mussallem Center for Biodesign Faculty Fellowship. Before sharing the details of his idea for an at-home cervical cancer screening device, he posed a straightforward question to the crowd: “Do any of the women in this room find Pap smears uncomfortable?”
No one raised a hand.
Avnesh Thakor, MD, PhD
“I thought, well, that’s it. I’m dead in the water,” Dr. Thakor remembers. But after the presentation, every single woman from the audience came up to him privately to express how Pap smears – or cervical cytology tests – are uncomfortable at best and in some cases, even extremely painful. That moment was the breakthrough moment for him. The silence revealed more than any show of hands could. Not only was the current standard of care for cervical cancer screening far from ideal, there was also a stigma to talking about it publicly.
“If this were something related to men’s health,” he later reflected, “it probably would’ve been solved years ago.”
That realization became the spark for what would eventually grow into two application patents and a design patent for the first-of-its-kind medical device. Under the guidance of Biodesign faculty program mentors Ryan VanWart and Richard Popp, Dr. Thakor began shaping his concept into a device that could make screening more accessible, private, and comfortable which he filed for a patent.
While the idea and technology were set to transform women’s health, Dr. Thakor realized that the first patent-pending iteration of his idea and device did not look very user-friendly, despite containing all the requirements for optimal user operation. As an interventional radiologist, Dr. Thakor uses devices every day to undertake complex minimally invasive image-guided operations in clinical practice, making him particularly attuned to device usability.
To reach women in a way that truly fit their needs, he collaborated with IDEO, a design and consulting firm, in 2020 to reimagine the device’s form while retaining its function, making sure to work closely with the device’s intended users – women – to iterate on the details. This collaboration led United States Patent Office (USPTO)-awarded design and application patents that reflected both the technical design, and the human-centered aspects, surrounding what is now called the Teal Wand™.
Diagram of the final cervical cancer screening device from the patent awarded to Dr. Thakor and Kara Egan. Patent number USD1021130S1.
With mentorship from Joseph DeSimone (Sanjiv Sam Gambhir Professor of Translational Medicine and Chemical Engineering in the Department of Radiology at Stanford), and partnership with Kara Egan (CEO and co-founder of Teal Health with Dr. Thakor), the redesigned device achieved a rare milestone for a diagnostic technology: an FDA breakthrough designation and then subsequent FDA approval of the Teal Wand™, the first and only at-home vaginal sample self-collection device for cervical cancer screening in the United States. Now, another major achievement has been achieved: the user-friendly device has been named in the Times Best New Inventions list of 2025.
Earlier this year, the device was also named in the Inc Awards, in the categories of Innovation by Design, Health/Wellness Design, and Design/Make. Embodying a lemons-to-lemonade turn of events, Dr. Thakor remarked that the technology and implementation of this in everyday life may not have matured as much as it has without the COVID-19 pandemic. “The pandemic normalized the idea of at-home, telehealth-enabled screening. It was no longer this foreign, futuristic concept, but a widely accepted way to getting test results quickly without leaving your house.”
Looking back, Thakor says the most meaningful part of the journey wasn’t the patents or the recognition, but the shift in conversation. What began with silence in a classroom has become a real-life product to improve comfort, equity, and access in women’s health.
physician-scientist who practices at Stanford University. He is an Associate Professor of Radiology, directs the translational Center of Interventional Radiology Innovation at Stanford (IRIS), and is the PI of an NIH-funded research lab focused on advancements in precision delivery.