New noninvasive endometriosis tests are on the rise

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New noninvasive endometriosis tests are on the rise

Shantana Hazel often thought her insides might fall out during menstruation. It took 14 years of stabbing pain before she ultimately received a diagnosis of endometriosis, an inflammatory disease where tissue similar to the uterine lining implants outside the uterus and bleeds with each cycle. The results can include painful periods and damaging scar tissue. Hazel, now 50 and the founder of the endometriosis advocacy organization Sister Girl Foundation, was once told by a surgeon that her internal organs were “fused together” by lesions resembling Laffy Taffy. After 16 surgeries, she had a hysterectomy at age 30. Hazel is far from alone. Endometriosis inflicts debilitating pain and heavy bleeding on more than 11% of reproductive-age women in the United States. Diagnosis takes nearly 10 years on average, partly because half the cases don’t show up on scans, and surgery is required to obtain tissue samples. But a new generation of noninvasive tests are emerging that could help accelerate diagnosis and improve management of this poorly understood condition. Within the next year, several companies, including Hera Biotech, Proteomics International, NextGen Jane, and Ziwig, aim to launch endometriosis diagnostics in the United States. Their tests analyze biomarkers—biological molecules (in this case, mRNA, proteins, or miRNA) that signal a disease or process like inflammation—in samples of endometrial tissue, blood, menstrual blood, and saliva. Ziwig Lab, headquartered in France, hopes to have their test approved for use in the United States soon.COURTESY MM PRODUCTION – MAGALI MEIRA These tests could help patients get an accurate diagnosis quickly and noninvasively, speeding access to endometriosis treatments and management strategies, including surgery, hormonal medications, and pelvic floor physical therapy. Early identification could also help doctors manage conditions for which people with endometriosis face increased risk, including cardiovascular disease, heart attack, and stroke. Endometriosis can also make it difficult to become pregnant. Because half of women with infertility have endometriosis, identifying and managing the condition sooner may improve fertility and IVF outcomes. Endometriosis biomarker tests rely on a range of technologies, including single-cell RNA sequencing and mass spectrometry that can identify thousands of proteins simultaneously. “These instruments are very good at precisely identifying a molecule, in [our] case a protein. And what’s changed over the last five or 10 years is they’ve gotten more sensitive,” says Proteomics cofounder Richard Lipscombe. Machine learning can also now efficiently sift through large quantities of the resulting data. So far only Ziwig has a test on the market. It uses a saliva sample to identify biomarkers in people with endometriosis symptoms and is currently sold in 30 countries. In France, where the company is based, the cost is fully covered by national health insurance. Some researchers are concerned that Ziwig’s test might not be accurate when it’s used in larger and more diverse populations; its interim validation study included just 200 people. “I’m not saying this doesn’t work. I just would want to see more validation,” says Kathryn Terry, an associate professor of epidemiology and gynecology at Harvard. Company representatives say they’re preparing to publish results on 1,000 patients in the near future, adding that French authorities had access to the full data set before approving government reimbursements. COURTESY MM PRODUCTION – MAGALI MEIRA These tests are emerging as momentum is building to tackle endometriosis. Over the past five years, France, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada have launched ambitious endometriosis initiatives. The potential benefits are not just on the individual level: In 2025, the World Economic Forum estimated that earlier diagnosis and improved treatment to address the chronic pain, infertility, and depression caused by endometriosis could add at least $12 billion to global GDP by 2040. As these biomarker tests are further developed, it’s possible their results could inform such treatments. Today surgery is often used to excise the lesions. The process can take as long as seven hours, and even then, lesions frequently form again. Jason Abbott, chair of Australia’s National Endometriosis Clinical and Scientific Trials Network, compares endometriosis management today to breast cancer care 30 years ago. Whereas doctors once prescribed surgery for all breast cancer patients, targeted treatments now address the underlying cell processes that help tumors grow and spread. Endometriosis tests could likewise help researchers categorize the condition’s distinct subsets and understand their underlying inflammatory pathways—information drugmakers could use to develop targeted treatments that keep it in remission. Colleen de Bellefonds is a science journalist based in Paris.

Hazel is far from alone. Endometriosis inflicts debilitating pain and heavy bleeding on more than 11% of reproductive-age women in the United States. Diagnosis takes nearly 10 years on average, partly because half the cases don’t show up on scans, and surgery is required to obtain tissue samples.

But a new generation of noninvasive tests are emerging that could help accelerate diagnosis and improve management of this poorly understood condition.

Within the next year, several companies, including Hera Biotech, Proteomics International, NextGen Jane, and Ziwig, aim to launch endometriosis diagnostics in the United States. Their tests analyze biomarkers—biological molecules (in this case, mRNA, proteins, or miRNA) that signal a disease or process like inflammation—in samples of endometrial tissue, blood, menstrual blood, and saliva.

The facade of the Ziwig Lab in France. — Ziwig Lab, headquartered in France, hopes to have their test approved for use in the United States soon.

These tests could help patients get an accurate diagnosis quickly and noninvasively, speeding access to endometriosis treatments and management strategies, including surgery, hormonal medications, and pelvic floor physical therapy. Early identification could also help doctors manage conditions for which people with endometriosis face increased risk, including cardiovascular disease, heart attack, and stroke. Endometriosis can also make it difficult to become pregnant. Because half of women with infertility have endometriosis, identifying and managing the condition sooner may improve fertility and IVF outcomes.

Endometriosis biomarker tests rely on a range of technologies, including single-cell RNA sequencing and mass spectrometry that can identify thousands of proteins simultaneously. “These instruments are very good at precisely identifying a molecule, in [our] case a protein. And what’s changed over the last five or 10 years is they’ve gotten more sensitive,” says Proteomics cofounder Richard Lipscombe. Machine learning can also now efficiently sift through large quantities of the resulting data.

So far only Ziwig has a test on the market. It uses a saliva sample to identify biomarkers in people with endometriosis symptoms and is currently sold in 30 countries. In France, where the company is based, the cost is fully covered by national health insurance.

Some researchers are concerned that Ziwig’s test might not be accurate when it’s used in larger and more diverse populations; its interim validation study included just 200 people. “I’m not saying this doesn’t work. I just would want to see more validation,” says Kathryn Terry, an associate professor of epidemiology and gynecology at Harvard. Company representatives say they’re preparing to publish results on 1,000 patients in the near future, adding that French authorities had access to the full data set before approving government reimbursements.

P4 Flowcell Cartridge for Illumina NextSeq 2000 Sequencing Platform.

These tests are emerging as momentum is building to tackle endometriosis. Over the past five years, France, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada have launched ambitious endometriosis initiatives.

The potential benefits are not just on the individual level: In 2025, the World Economic Forum estimated that earlier diagnosis and improved treatment to address the chronic pain, infertility, and depression caused by endometriosis could add at least $12 billion to global GDP by 2040.

As these biomarker tests are further developed, it’s possible their results could inform such treatments. Today surgery is often used to excise the lesions. The process can take as long as seven hours, and even then, lesions frequently form again. Jason Abbott, chair of Australia’s National Endometriosis Clinical and Scientific Trials Network, compares endometriosis management today to breast cancer care 30 years ago. Whereas doctors once prescribed surgery for all breast cancer patients, targeted treatments now address the underlying cell processes that help tumors grow and spread. Endometriosis tests could likewise help researchers categorize the condition’s distinct subsets and understand their underlying inflammatory pathways—information drugmakers could use to develop targeted treatments that keep it in remission.

Colleen de Bellefonds is a science journalist based in Paris.

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Phillips 66 and Kinder Plan 1st Ever California-Bound Fuel Pipe

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Riverbed tackles AI data bottleneck with new Oracle-based service

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Roundup: Digital Realty Marks Major Milestones in AI, Quantum Computing, Data Center Development

Key features of the DRIL include: • High-Density AI and HPC Testing. The DRIL supports AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads with high-density colocation, accommodating workloads up to 150 kW per cabinet. • AI Infrastructure Optimization. The ePlus AI Experience Center lets businesses explore AI-specific power, cooling, and GPU resource requirements in an environment optimized for AI infrastructure. • Hybrid Cloud Validation. With direct cloud connectivity, users can refine hybrid strategies and onboard through cross connects. • AI Workload Orchestration. Customers can orchestrate AI workloads across Digital Realty’s Private AI Exchange (AIPx) for seamless integration and performance. • Latency Testing Across Locations. Enterprises can test latency scenarios for seamless performance across multiple locations and cloud destinations. The firm’s Northern Virginia campus is the primary DRIL location, but companies can also test latency scenarios between there and other remote locations. DRIL rollout to other global locations is already in progress, and London is scheduled to go live in early 2026. Digital Realty, Redeployable Launch Pathway for Veteran Technical Careers As new data centers are created, they need talented workers. To that end, Digital Realty has partnered with Redeployable, an AI-powered career platform for veterans, to expand access to technical careers in the United Kingdom and United States. The collaboration launched a Site Engineer Pathway, now live on the Redeployable platform. It helps veterans explore, prepare for, and transition into roles at Digital Realty. Nearly half of veterans leave their first civilian role within a year, often due to unclear expectations, poor skill translation, and limited support, according to Redeployable. The Site Engineer Pathway uses real-world relevance and replaces vague job descriptions with an experience-based view of technical careers. Veterans can engage in scenario-based “job drops” simulating real facility and system challenges so they can assess their fit for the role before applying. They

BlackRock’s $40B data center deal opens a new infrastructure battle for CIOs

Everest Group partner Yugal Joshi said, “CIOs are under significant pressure to clearly define their data center strategy beyond traditional one-off leases. Given most of the capacity is built and delivered by fewer players, CIOs need to prepare for a higher-price market with limited negotiation power.” The numbers bear this out. Global data center costs rose to $217.30 per kilowatt per month in the first quarter of 2025, with major markets seeing increases of 17-18% year-over-year, according to CBRE. Those prices are at levels last seen in 2011-2012, and analysts expect them to remain elevated. Gogia said, “The combination of AI demand, energy scarcity, and environmental regulation has permanently rewritten the economics of running workloads. Prices that once looked extraordinary have now become baseline.” Hyperscalers get first dibs The consolidation problem is compounded by the way capacity is being allocated. North America’s data center vacancy rate fell to 1.6% in the first half of 2025, with Northern Virginia posting just 0.76%, according to CBRE Research. More troubling for enterprises: 74.3% of capacity currently under construction is already preleased, primarily to cloud and AI providers. “The global compute market is no longer governed by open supply and demand,” Gogia said. “It is increasingly shaped by pre-emptive control. Hyperscalers and AI majors are reserving capacity years in advance, often before the first trench for power is dug. This has quietly created a two-tier world: one in which large players guarantee their future and everyone else competes for what remains.” That dynamic forces enterprises into longer planning cycles. “CIOs must forecast their infrastructure requirements with the same precision they apply to financial budgets and talent pipelines,” Gogia said. “The planning horizon must stretch to three or even five years.”

Nvidia, Infineon partner for AI data center power overhaul

The solution is to convert power right at the GPU on the server board and to upgrade the backbone to 800 volts. That should squeeze more reliability and efficiency out of the system while dealing with the heat, Infineon stated. Nvidia announced the 800 Volt direct current (VDC) power architecture at Computex 2025 as a much-needed replacement for the 54 Volt backbone currently in use, which is overwhelmed by the demand of AI processors and increasingly prone to failure. “This makes sense with the power needs of AI and how it is growing,” said Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst with Forrester Research. “This helps mitigate power losses seen from lower voltage and AC systems, reduces the need for materials like copper for wiring/bus bars, better reliability, and better serviceability.” Infineon says a shift to a centralized 800 VDC architecture allows for reduced power losses, higher efficiency and reliability. However, the new architecture requires new power conversion solutions and safety mechanisms to prevent potential hazards and costly server downtimes such as service and maintenance.

Meta details cutting-edge networking technologies for AI infrastructure

ESUN initiative As part of its standardization efforts, Meta said it would be a key player in the new Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking (ESUN) initiative that brings together AMD, Arista, ARM, Broadcom, Cisco, HPE Networking, Marvell, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Oracle to advance the networking technology to handle the growing scale-up domain for AI systems. ESUN will focus solely on open, standards-based Ethernet switching and framing for scale-up networking—excluding host-side stacks, non-Ethernet protocols, application-layer solutions, and proprietary technologies. The group will focus on the development and interoperability of XPU network interfaces and Ethernet switch ASICs for scale-up networks, the OCP wrote in a blog. ESUN will actively engage with other organizations such as Ultra-Ethernet Consortium (UEC) and long-standing IEEE 802.3 Ethernet to align open standards, incorporate best practices, and accelerate innovation, the OCP stated. Data center networking milestones The launch of ESUN is just one of the AI networking developments Meta shared at the event. Meta engineers also announced three data center networking innovations aimed at making its infrastructure more flexible, scalable, and efficient: The evolution of Meta’s Disaggregated Scheduled Fabric (DSF) to support scale-out interconnect for large AI clusters that span entire data center buildings. A new Non-Scheduled Fabric (NSF) architecture based entirely on shallow-buffer, disaggregated Ethernet switches that will support our largest AI clusters like Prometheus. The addition of Minipack3N, based on Nvidia’s Ethernet Spectrum-4 ASIC, to Meta’s portfolio of 51Tbps OCP switches that use OCP’s Switch Abstraction Interface and Meta’s Facebook Open Switching System (FBOSS) software stack. DSF is Meta’s open networking fabric that completely separates switch hardware, NICs, endpoints, and other networking components from the underlying network and uses OCP-SAI and FBOSS to achieve that, according to Meta. It supports Ethernet-based RoCE RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE/RDMA)) to endpoints, accelerators and NICs from multiple vendors, such as Nvidia,

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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