{"id":606628,"date":"2023-02-10T13:49:41","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T19:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/10\/scientists-create-vagina-on-a-chip-what-to-know\/"},"modified":"2023-02-10T13:49:41","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T19:49:41","slug":"scientists-create-vagina-on-a-chip-what-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/10\/scientists-create-vagina-on-a-chip-what-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Create ‘Vagina on a Chip’: What to Know"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Feb. 9, 2023 — For years, women\u2019s health advocates have argued that far more research is needed on women\u2019s bodies and health. The world\u2019s first-ever \u201cvagina on a chip,\u201d recently developed at Harvard\u2019s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, could go a long way to making that happen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWomen\u2019s health has not received the attention it deserves,\u201d says\u00a0Don Ingber, MD, PhD, who led the team that created the vagina chip. The advance quickly drew media attention after it was reported in the\u00a0<\/span>journal\u00a0<\/span>Microbiome<\/i><\/a> in late November. But researchers hope for more than headlines. They see the chip as a way to facilitate vaginal health research and open the door to vital new treatments.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By now, you may have heard of \u201corgans on chips\u201d: tiny devices about the size of a flash drive that are designed to mimic the biological activity of human organs. These glass chips contain living human cells within grooves that allow the passage of fluid, to either maintain or disrupt the cells\u2019 function. So far, Ingber and his team at the Wyss Institute have developed more than 15 organ chip models, including chips that mimic the\u00a0<\/span>lung<\/span><\/a>,<\/span>\u00a0intestine<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>kidney,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>bone marrow<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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The idea to develop a vagina chip grew out of research, funded by the Gates Foundation, on a childhood disease called environmental enteric dysfunction, an intestinal disease most commonly found in low-resource nations that is the second leading cause of death in children under 5. That\u2019s when Ingber discovered just how much the child\u2019s microbiome influences this disease.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Stemming from that work, the Gates Foundation turned its attention to newborn health — in particular, the impact of bacterial vaginosis, an imbalance in the vagina\u2019s bacterial makeup. Bacterial vaginosis occurs in 1 out of 4 women worldwide and has been linked to premature birth as well as HIV, HPV persistence, and cervical cancer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Upon establishing the\u00a0<\/span>Vaginal Microbiome Research Consortium,\u00a0<\/span><\/a> the foundation asked Ingber to engineer an organ chip that mimicked the vagina\u2019s microbiome. The goal was to test \u201clive biotherapeutic products,\u201d or living microbes like probiotics, that might restore the vagina\u2019s microbiome to health. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

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No other preclinical model exists to perform tests like that, says Ingber.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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\u201cThe vagina chip is a way to help make some advances,” he says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Pushing for More Women\u2019s Health Research<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The Gates Foundation recognized that women\u2019s reproductive health is a major issue, not only in low-income nations, but everywhere around the world. As the project evolved, Ingber began to hear from female colleagues about how neglected women\u2019s reproductive health is in medical science.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is something I became sensitive to and realized this is just the starting point,\u201d Ingber says.<\/span><\/p>\n

Take bacterial vaginosis, for example. Since 1982, treatment has revolved around the same two antibiotics. That\u2019s partly because there is no animal model to study. No other species has the same vaginal bacterial community as humans do.<\/span><\/p>\n

That makes developing any new therapy \u201cincredibly challenging,\u201d explains\u00a0Caroline Mitchell, MD, MPH, an OB\/GYN at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the consortium.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It turns out, replicating the vagina in a lab dish is, to use the technical term, very hard.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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\u201cThat\u2019s where a vagina chip offers an opportunity,\u201d Mitchell says. \u201cIt’s not super high-throughput, but it’s way more high-throughput than a [human] clinical trial.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As such, the vagina chip could help scientists find new treatments much faster.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Like Ingber, Mitchell also sees the chip as a way to bring more attention to the largely unmet needs in female reproductive medicine.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWomen\u2019s reproductive health has been under-resourced, under-prioritized, and largely disregarded for decades,\u201d she says. And the time may be ripe for change: Mitchell says she was encouraged by the National Institutes of Health\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Advancing NIH Research on the Health of Women<\/span><\/a> conference, held in 2021 in response to a congressional request to address women\u2019s health research efforts. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond bacterial vaginosis, Mitchell imagines the chip could help scientists find new treatments for vaginal yeast infection (candidiasis), chlamydia, and endometriosis. As with bacterial vaginosis, medicines for <\/span>vaginal yeast infections <\/span><\/a>have not advanced in decades, Mitchell says. \u00a0Efforts to develop a vaccine for chlamydia — which can cause permanent damage to a woman\u2019s reproductive system — have dragged on for many years. And\u00a0<\/span>endometriosis<\/span><\/a>, an often painful condition in which the tissue that makes up the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, remains under-researched despite affecting 10% of childbearing-age women.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

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While some mouse models are used in chlamydia research, it\u2019s hard to say if they\u2019ll translate to humans, given the vaginal and cervical bacterial differences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur understanding of the basic physiology of the environment of the vagina and cervix is another area where we’re woefully ignorant,\u201d Mitchell says.<\/span><\/p>\n

To that end, Ingber\u2019s team is developing more complex chips mimicking the vagina and the cervix. One of his team members wants to use the chips to study infertility. The researchers have already used the chips to see how bacterial vaginosis and mucous changes impact the way sperm migrates up the reproductive tract.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The lab is now linking vagina and cervix chips together to study viral infections of the cervix, like HPV, and all types of bacterial diseases of the vaginal tract. By applying cervical mucus to the vagina chip, they hope to learn more about how female reproductive tissues respond to infection and inflammation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI always say that organ chips are like synthetic biology at the cell tissue and organ level,\u201d says Ingber. \u201cYou start simple and see if you [can] mimic a clinical situation.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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As they make the chips more complex \u2013 perhaps by adding blood vessel cells and female hormones \u2013 Ingber foresees being able to study the response to hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe can begin to explore the effects of cycling over time as well as other types of hormonal effects,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ingber also envisions linking the vagina chip to other organ chips \u2013 he\u2019s already succeeded in linking eight different organ types together. But for now, the team hopes the vagina chip will enhance our understanding of basic female reproductive biology and speed up the process of developing new treatments for women\u2019s health.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Read More<\/a>
\n Tama Redner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Feb. 9, 2023 — For years, women\u2019s health advocates have argued that far more research is needed on women\u2019s bodies and health. The world\u2019s first-ever \u201cvagina on a chip,\u201d recently developed at Harvard\u2019s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, could go a long way to making that happen.\u00a0\u201cWomen\u2019s health has not received the attention it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":606629,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2904,3807],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-606628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-create","category-scientists"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}