modeling-healthy-dysbiotic-vaginal-microenvironments-human-vagina-on

Modeling Healthy and Dysbiotic Vaginal Microenvironments in a Human Vagina-on-a-Chip

Women's health, and particularly diseases of the female reproductive tract (FRT), have not received the attention they deserve, even though an unhealthy ...

Harvard University

The surfaces of human internal organs are lined by a mucus layer that ensures symbiotic relationships with commensal microbiome while protecting against potentially injurious environmental chemicals, toxins, and pathogens, and disruption of this layer can contribute to disease development. Studying mucus biology has been challenging due to the lack of physiologically relevant human in vitro models. Here we review recent progress that has been made in the development of human organ-on-a-chip microfluidic culture models that reconstitute epithelial tissue barriers and physiologically relevant mucus layers with a focus on lung, colon, small intestine, cervix and vagina. These organ-on-a-chip models that incorporate dynamic fluid flow, air-liquid interfaces, and physiologically relevant mechanical cues can be used to study mucus composition, mechanics, and structure, as well as investigate its contributions to human health and disease with a level of biomimicry not possible in the past.

Modeling mucus physiology and pathophysiology in human organs-on-chips.

A dominance of non-iners Lactobacillus species in the vaginal microbiome is optimal and strongly associated with gynecological and obstetric health, while the presence of diverse obligate or facultative anaerobic bacteria and a paucity in Lactobacillus species, similar to communities found in bacterial vaginosis (BV), is considered non-optimal and associated with adverse health outcomes. Various therapeutic strategies are being explored to modulate the composition of the vaginal microbiome; however, there is no human model that faithfully reproduces the vaginal epithelial microenvironment for preclinical validation of potential therapeutics or testing hypotheses about vaginal epithelium-microbiome interactions.

Aakanksha Gulati

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering

Harvard University

Modeling Healthy and Dysbiotic Vaginal Microenvironments in a Human Vagina-on-a-Chip

Aakanksha Gulati

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Harvard University

Modeling Healthy and Dysbiotic Vaginal Microenvironments in a Human Vagina-on-a-Chip

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering