Harvard scientists have created a vagina on a chip with cells from two women

Harvard University bioengineer Don Ingber is dedicated to the creation of organs and for this he uses flexible silicone parts where he grows tissues that can mimic the physical interactions between cells. Among others those of the vagina.

Over the past decade, the Harvard University bioengineer has created more than fifteen organ fragments, including ones that simulate lungs, liver, intestines and skin.

Also, the human microbiome has been a hot topic in the last decade, with research pointing to disrupted bacterial communities as the culprit for a number of diseases including irritable bowel syndrome, eczema and autoimmune diseases.

vagina on a chip

Just as probiotics are now being prescribed to treat intestinal problems, it is difficult to conduct preclinical studies because the human vaginal microbiome is radically different from that of standard animal models.

Studies have found that lactobacilli make up over 70% of the healthy human vaginal microbiome, but less than 1% of the vaginal microbiome of other mammals.

Harvard University researchers have created a solution to this problem in the form of a new organic chip that replicates, in vitro, the microenvironment of human vaginal tissue, including its microbiome.

Composed of human vaginal epithelium and underlying connective tissue cells, the Vagina Chip reproduces many of the physiological characteristics of the vagina and can be inoculated with different strains of bacteria to study their effects on organ health. The chip is described in a new article published in Microbiome.

How the vaginal chip was created

The Vagina Chip was developed with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose goal was to create a human biotherapeutic treatment for reduce reproductive tract infections, prenatal complications and infant mortality rates, especially in low-resource countries.

One major obstacle was that there were no good preclinical models to study which therapies could actually treat human tissue. “Our team’s project was to create a chip of the human vagina to aid in the development and testing of new therapies,” said Akanksha Gulati, MD, co-author, postdoctoral researcher, Wyss Institute.

Using the Organ Chip microfluidic platform, developed at the Wyss Institute and subsequently licensed to Emulate, the team seeded the upper canal of a polymer chip with human vaginal epithelial cells.

Next, they added human uterine fibroblast cells to the opposite side of the permeable membrane that separates the upper and lower canals. This 3D arrangement reproduced the structure of the human vaginal wall.

After five days, the Vagina Chip had grown into multiple distinct layers of differentiated cells that matched those of human vaginal tissue.

Most studies have focused on the human gut microbiome, but it is increasingly recognized that another, often overlooked, bacterial community deserves the same attention: the one found in the vagina.