A microfluidic chip designed to mimic the vagina's microbiome is likely to drive vital new treatments in the long-neglected field of women's reproductive health.
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’s when Ingber discovered just how much the child’s microbiome influences this disease.
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’s 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.the foundation asked Ingber to engineer an organ chip that mimicked the vagina’s microbiome.
That makes developing any new therapy “incredibly challenging,” explains Caroline Mitchell, MD, MPH, an OB/GYN at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the consortium.“That’s where a vagina chip offers an opportunity,” Mitchell says. “It's not super high-throughput, but it's way more high-throughput than a [human] clinical trial.”Like Ingber, Mitchell also sees the chip as a way to bring more attention to the largely unmet needs in female reproductive medicine.
“Women’s reproductive health has been under-resourced, under-prioritized, and largely disregarded for decades,” she says. And the time may be ripe for change: Mitchell says she was encouraged by the National Institutes of Health’sconference, held in 2021 in response to a congressional request to address women’s health research efforts.
Beyond bacterial vaginosis, Mitchell imagines the chip could help scientists find new treatments for vaginal yeast infection , chlamydia, and endometriosis. As with bacterial vaginosis, medicines for
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