February 9, 2023 – For years, women’s health advocates have argued that far more research into women’s bodies and health is required. The world’s first “vagina on a chip,” recently developed at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, could go a great distance toward making that occur.
“Women’s health has not received the attention it deserves,” says Dr. Don Ingber, who led the team that developed the vagina chip. The advance quickly caught media attention after it was featured within the diary Microbiome End of November. But the researchers are hoping for greater than just headlines. They see the chip as a solution to facilitate research into vaginal health and open the door to necessary latest treatments.
You can have heard of “organs on chips”: tiny devices the dimensions of a USB stick designed to mimic the biological activity of human organs. These glass chips contain living human cells in grooves that allow the passage of fluid to either maintain or disrupt the cells’ function. So far, Ingber and his team on the Wyss Institute have developed greater than 15 organ chip models, including chips that lung, Colon, Kidney, And Bone marrow.
The idea of developing a vagina chip got here about as a part of research funded by the Gates Foundation right into a childhood disease called environmental bowel dysfunction, a bowel disease that happens primarily in poor countries and is the second leading explanation for death in children under five. Ingber discovered how strongly the kid's microbiome influences this disease.
This work led the Gates Foundation to deal with newborn health—specifically the results of bacterial vaginosis, an imbalance within the bacterial composition of the vagina. Bacterial vaginosis affects one in 4 women worldwide and is linked to preterm birth, in addition to HIV, HPV persistence, and cervical cancer.
With the founding of the Consortium for Research on the Vaginal Microbiome, The foundation asked Ingber to develop an organ chip that mimics the vaginal microbiome. The goal was to check “living biotherapeutic products,” or live microbes equivalent to probiotics that might restore the vaginal microbiome to health.
There is not any other preclinical model to conduct such tests, says Ingber.
“The vagina chip is one way to make some progress,” he says.
Pushing for more research on women’s health
The Gates Foundation recognized that girls's reproductive health was a significant problem, not only in low-income countries, but all around the world. During the course of the project, Ingber learned from female colleagues how neglected women's reproductive health was in medical science.
“I have become aware of this and have realized that this is only the starting point,” says Ingber.
Take bacterial vaginosis, for instance. Since 1982, treatment has revolved around the identical two antibiotics. This is partly because there isn’t any animal model to review. No other species has the identical vaginal bacterial community as humans.
This makes developing a brand new therapy “incredibly difficult,” explains Caroline Mitchell, MD, MPH, a gynecologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the consortium.
It seems that it’s, to make use of the technical term, very difficult to recreate the vagina in a laboratory dish.
“This is where a vagina chip offers an opportunity,” says Mitchell. “It will not be super high throughput, but much higher than a [human] clinical study.”
The vagina chip could therefore help scientists find new treatment methods much more quickly.
Like Ingber, Mitchell sees the chip as an opportunity to draw more attention to the largely unmet needs in female reproductive medicine.
“Women’s reproductive health has been underfunded, underprioritized and largely ignored for decades,” she says. And the time may be ripe for change: Mitchell says she has been encouraged by the Promoting NIH research on women’s health Conference held in 2021 in response to a congressional request to address women's health research efforts.
Beyond bacterial vaginosis, the chip could help scientists find new treatments for vaginal yeast infections (candidiasis), chlamydia and endometriosis. As with bacterial vaginosis, drugs for vaginal yeast infections Progress has not been made for decades, Mitchell says. Efforts to develop a vaccine against chlamydia – which can cause permanent damage to a woman’s reproductive system – have dragged on for many years. And Endometriosisan often painful condition in which the tissue that makes up the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, is still little understood, although 10% of all women of childbearing age are affected.
Although some mouse models are used in chlamydia research, given the bacterial differences in the vagina and cervix, it is difficult to say whether these are transmissible to humans.
“We are also woefully ignorant in our understanding of the basic physiology of the vaginal and cervical environment,” says Mitchell.
To this end, Ingber's team is developing more complex chips that mimic the vagina and cervix. One of his team members wants to use the chips to research infertility. The researchers have already used the chips to study how bacterial vaginosis and mucosal changes affect the way sperm travel through the reproductive tract.
The lab is currently linking vagina and cervical chips together to study viral infections of the cervix, such as HPV, and all kinds of bacterial diseases of the vaginal tract. By applying cervical mucus to the vagina chip, they hope to learn more about how female reproductive tissue responds to infection and inflammation.
“I all the time say that organ chips are like synthetic biology on the cellular tissue and organ level,” says Ingber. “You just start and see should you can [can] mimic a clinical situation.”
By making the chips more complex – for instance by adding blood vessel cells and feminine hormones – Ingber believes that in the longer term they may give you the chance to review the response to hormonal changes in the course of the menstrual cycle.
“We can start to look at the effects of cycling over time as well as other types of hormonal effects,” he says.
Ingber also plans to attach the vagina chip to other organ chips – he has already succeeded in connecting eight different organ types. But first, the team hopes the vagina chip will improve our understanding of basic female reproductive biology and speed up the event of recent treatments for ladies's health.