Blueprint, the company behind Bryan Johnson's Don't Die longevity regimen, has begun a female version of its protocol, with co-founder Kate Tolo as the single test subject. Johnson introduced the project in a YouTube video on 21 August 20262, and Tolo set out the design in a post on the Blueprint site three days later1. The plan is to measure one woman across several menstrual cycles and to publish what the team finds.
What happened
In the Blueprint post, Tolo writes that she is starting a female-specific protocol backed by $2 million a year in funding and a dedicated medical team1. The stated aim is to produce health data centred on women, which the post presents as a response to historical gaps in women's clinical research1.
Johnson's video description gives a larger budget, $2.6 million, and lists the planned scale of the measurement effort2:
- 1,900 biomarkers
- 16 biological systems
- 14.8 million data points
- more than 50 measurement devices
According to the Blueprint post, samples will come from blood, urine, stool and the vaginal microbiome, with testing at four points in each cycle: menstruation, the follicular phase, ovulation and the luteal phase1. Baseline tests listed include a full-body MRI, blood draws, retinal imaging, hormone tracking, skin analysis, a DEXA scan and a VO2 max test1. Tolo will keep a consistent daily routine of nutrition, sleep and exercise for multiple months while the data are collected1.
"I am about to become the most measured woman in history."1
Why a separate female protocol
The Blueprint post says Johnson's existing protocol was built on population-level data drawn from both men and women, and that he has collected 1.5 billion data points on himself over five years1. Tolo's version is meant to look at questions his protocol was never designed to answer. The post lists them: whether fertility can be improved, exercise matched to cycle phase, PMS symptoms, cycle regularity, nutritional needs by phase, changes to recovery, and early detection of perimenopause1.
Speaking to ABC's triple j Hack, Tolo said: "In the back of both our minds, female health was always next, and it's such an important and deeply personal issue to me."4 She described the scope as: "We're measuring my skin, my brain, my microbiome and my gut, my mouth, my stool, my vaginal microbiome, literally everything."4
The project is personal in another way. Tolo has endometriosis, which the Blueprint post says affects about 10% of women worldwide, and she previously completed Johnson's 90-day protocol1. Writer Emma Waters reported that Tolo received her endometriosis diagnosis in 42 days without surgery, using an endometriosis-specific ultrasound, a blood test, an AI-read MRI and a saliva test, compared with the seven to ten years many women wait for a diagnosis3. Decrypt later reported that Tolo was also diagnosed with PCOS and adenomyosis after about six weeks of testing5.
What kind of evidence this is
This is a single-person self-experiment, designed, run and reported by the company that sells the protocol. At launch, no results from the female protocol had been released, and nothing has appeared in a peer-reviewed journal12. The figures above describe what the team plans to measure, not what it has found.
An n=1 design has well-known limits:
- No comparison group. With one subject, changes over time are hard to separate from normal cycle-to-cycle variation, seasonal effects or the effect of being closely monitored.
- Limited reach. One woman in her thirties with diagnosed reproductive conditions cannot stand in for women of other ages, health states or backgrounds.
- Many measures, one person. Tracking hundreds of biomarkers in one body makes it likely that some will move by chance alone.
- Self-reporting. The company decides which results to publish and how to frame them.
Outside commentary so far has been mixed. Waters, who writes about fertility, rejected Johnson's broader transhumanist outlook but argued the work could have downstream value for research into understudied reproductive conditions3. Dr Brooke Nickel, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney School of Public Health, told ABC that "we should be careful not to confuse good public health practices with vested interests"4.
Numbers that do not yet line up
The launch materials disagree on some basic figures:
| Item | Blueprint post | Other source |
|---|---|---|
| Annual budget | $2 million1 | $2.6 million, per Johnson's video and Waters23 |
| Data points | Not stated | 14.8 million in the video2; 14 million per ABC4 |
| Duration | "Multiple months"1 | 100 days, per Waters3 |
| Medical team | "Dedicated" team1 | 12 people, per Waters3 |
None of these gaps change the basic design, but they are worth checking against any results the team publishes.
Who is behind it
Johnson, 49, and Tolo, 30, are partners, and ABC lists them as co-founders of the Blueprint, Don't Die and Immortals brands4. Blueprint sells supplements and nutrition products, and Johnson's launch video points viewers to Immortals, his health platform2. Immortals launched in February 2026 as a $1 million-a-year program with three slots, and Decrypt reported that it has since been refocused on building tools that let people find and fix their own health problems5. The Blueprint post says findings from the female protocol will be shared for free1.
The launch followed Johnson's disclosure on 30 June that he had been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, a chronic condition in which the immune system attacks the stomach lining56. Decrypt has described a wider shift in his work this year, away from visible anti-aging and toward detecting and treating disease5. Johnson told The Telegraph in October: "I like the challenge. I'm up for it, I think it's good timing."6
What to watch next
The main test is what gets published. Useful signs would be the release of underlying biomarker data along with how each measure was collected, a clear record of what was changed in Tolo's routine and when, inclusion of measures that showed no change, and analysis by researchers outside the company. Any claim that a specific intervention improved a cycle-related outcome would need repetition in more than one woman before it could say anything about women in general.
For now, the project is a detailed public record of one person's health data, run by a company with products to sell. That can still be useful for generating questions about female physiology, which the team says is its aim1.
