Grad’s platform aims to empower women with personalized reproductive health information
Northeastern University graduate Eugenia Carvajal Minvielle wants Vie to serve as an empowering platform for women’s reproductive health.
What if you could test a contraceptive before ever taking it, meaning no trial and error with possible side effects like mood swings or headaches?
Vie is a digital platform under development by Northeastern University graduate Eugenia Carvajal Minvielle that acts as a “digital twin” of a woman’s reproductive system to predict how she will respond to a drug.
Carvajal Minvielle is starting her venture by focusing on contraceptives, but she ultimately expects the platform to monitor a woman’s health from her first period through menopause.
The inspiration for the venture came from the historical lack of research in women’s health, as well as her own medical experience.
“It’s personalized and data-driven, being able to create a whole journey where – based on your needs, on your biology, on your side effects – you can tailor your treatment,” she told Northeastern Global News.
Vie is in its early stages and some details remain under wraps during the patent application process. But Carvajal Minvielle wants the platform to empower women with information about their health and believes that by tracking symptoms, it could lead to earlier detection of conditions like endometriosis, where the inner lining of the uterus grows outside of the uterus, or polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, a hormone health issue also known as PMOS. She wants women’s health not to be a taboo topic, but something people can understand and talk about openly.
While growing up in Mexico City, Carvajal Minvielle wasn’t getting her period like other girls her age. Doctors ran a number of tests but couldn’t offer a clear answer as to the cause and offered a surgery that didn’t address the issue.
When Carvajal Minvielle began studying chemical engineering at Northeastern in 2012, she continued to search for answers in Boston. She found a specialist in congenital diseases and learned that she had Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, which is the underdevelopment of one or more parts of the female reproductive system. It affects one in 5,000 female births.
“I had no idea about this because it’s something that people don’t talk about. And because they don’t talk about it, no one knows about it,” she said. “It’s hard to go through it when things like this happen.”
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After graduation, Carvajal Minvielle moved to San Francisco to join a biotechnology startup. She loved the fast pace and innovation.
“I really enjoyed the whole process of building a company and a technology, taking it through market and then acquisition,” she said. She started to learn about another aspect of the startup realm, venture capital, and started to think about the platform that would become Vie.
The value of women and their health has been “certainly something we’ve had to fight for for a very long time,” said Felicia Knaul, an economist and global health researcher who became a mentor of Carvajal Minvielle’s while she was studying in Boston.
It wasn’t until 2016 that the National Institutes of Health, a U.S. agency through which public health and biomedical research is conducted, made an official policy requiring that studies related to vertebrate animals use both male and female mice or their cells. It recognized that “male animals and cells may obscure understanding of key sex influences on health processes and outcomes.”
“We didn’t get the information we needed about our own health. We’re playing catch up with that,” Knaul said, adding that Vie would be a “great contribution” to the effort.
Carvajal Minvielle was recently named a fellow of the 2026 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards, a Northeastern initiative that recognizes innovations in health, AI, technology, social impact, arts and more.
“It was a perfect moment for me to know that someone believed in this idea, not only for the money,” she said. “It really is gratifying.”
