Female reproductive system on a chip
Bioengineers reproduced the menstrual cycle "in vitro"
American bioengineers and doctors have recreated the female menstrual cycle in an "organ-on-a–chip" - their working model of female reproductive organs simulates fluctuations in estrogen and progesterone for a month.
"Organs-on-a-chip" are microphysiological models of various organs, human and not only. With their help, scientists study the functions of organs, the mechanisms of their work and reactions. Such models have already been built, for example, for the heart, lung, kidney, artery and skin – they are more realistic than conventional cell cultures that scientists work with, and more convenient than laboratory animals.
Scientists from Northwestern University in Chicago and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge (Massachusetts) have created a model of the female reproductive system, which they called EVATAR. On a small plate, engineers placed three-dimensional models of the ovaries, fallopian tubes, the endometrium that lines the uterus, and the liver (it was needed because in a real body it is the liver that "processes" drugs). They are washed by a special liquid that performs the functions of blood.
All the tissues were human, except for the ovaries – they were taken from a mouse. Estrogen and progesterone are the same in mice and humans, so their effects on human tissues should be the same or very similar. In addition, healthy ovaries in women are not removed, so it is almost impossible for scientists to get them.
For the first time, the team managed to make five different tissues "live" in one "organ-on-a-chip" long enough to observe the entire normal menstrual cycle, that is, for 28 days. So far, the model can simulate only one element of the work of the real female reproductive system – the production of hormones within the cycle, but, for example, not the movement of eggs (they mature, but do not move anywhere), and especially not pregnancy.
The authors believe that in the future their development will help to create new drugs and test them for efficacy and safety, and it can also be used in studies of the causes of endometriosis, fibroids and some types of cancer and infertility. Eventually, scientists believe, such "organs-on-a-chip" can be grown individually for each patient from his or her stem cells.
The researchers' article was published in the journal Nature Communications (Xiao et al., A microfluidic culture model of the human reproductive tract and 28-day menstrual cycle).
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29.03.2017