Harvard doctor invents vagina on a chip for womens health issues | Latest Tech News
Harvard scientists have been honored for creating the world’s first “vagina-on-a-chip,” a groundbreaking gadget that mimics the feminine reproductive tract utilizing residing human cells.
The tiny lab-grown model permits researchers to better research the vaginal microbiome, including the consequences of hormones, healthy bacteria, infections and doable remedies — all without experimenting on mice, which don’t have the same hormonal modifications as people.
“These are very detailed aspects of human biology that we can now observe and test with these models that we previously couldn’t do with animals, and that sets the stage for us to develop better and more effective strategies for women,” Dr. Zohreh Izadifar, who helped develop the gadget, told The Post.
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Earlier this month, Izadifar obtained the £50,000 Lush Prize 2026 for Science in recognition of the invention, which consultants are calling a major breakthrough in the long-overlooked subject of girls’s health.
“Women’s health has been under-invested and under-studied for so many decades, and that has created a gap in what we know about what is driving the diseases women have,” she said.
“My passion is to leverage this technology to better understand what is going on,” Izadifar continued. “What are the mechanisms that help our body function the way it does — and then what goes wrong that makes it become more susceptible to chronic conditions.”
First developed in 2022, the gadget is made from a permeable plastic membrane designed to replicate the construction of the vaginal wall. Scientists seed the chip with donated human cells taken from the vagina, permitting residing tissue to grow inside the gadget.
“Over time, these cells will grow to create a tissue that is actually viable, so we can do testing on it,” explained Izadifar, an assistant professor at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a research scholar at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Roughly the scale of a USB drive, the chip incorporates tiny electrical sensors that let scientists monitor how human tissue reacts in real time to infections, medicines and environmental modifications.
Researchers say the technology is critical because girls’s reproductive health research have long depended on animal testing — despite major organic variations between animals and people.
“The major challenge with animals is they do not have the same hormonal changes that humans do,” Izadifar said. “The mouse does not menstruate. They do not go through menopause in the same sense that humans do.”
The “vagina-on-a-chip” gadget was developed in 2022 by researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. Wyss Institute / Harvard University
Those variations have sophisticated efforts to research circumstances tied to fertility, being pregnant and infections.
“Anatomically, they’re different, genetically they’re different, and if you want to talk about their microbiome, they’re not colonized with the same bacteria that humans are,” Izadifar said.
That mismatch has been particularly irritating for scientists learning bacterial vaginosis, or BV — a common infection precipitated by bacterial imbalance in the vagina and cervix that impacts more than a quarter of reproductive-age girls worldwide.
“A mouse cannot really develop that,” Izadifar said. “Over the years, people have used mouse models, and they kind of force the animals to get infected, but those animals have immune systems that are stronger, so they overcome that artificially created infection within hours.”
“In that sense animal models are not really a good kind of representative of the female human female biology to do these good studies on,” she said.
As a end result, researchers have struggled to take a look at new interventions for BV, which might be cleared up with antibiotics, though up to 80% of girls expertise a recurrence within a yr of treatment.
“The Lush Prize is a powerful recognition of our efforts to advance a future of biomedical research that is human-relevant and animal-free,” Izadifar said.
The award is given yearly by the wonder company Lush Cosmetics in collaboration with the campaigning research group Ethical Consumer.
Dr. Zohreh Izadifar was awarded the Lush Prize 2026 for Science in recognition of the “vagina-on-a-chip.” Lush Cosmetics
The rise of organs-on-a-chip
The vagina isn’t the first physique half to get the “on-a-chip” treatment. Similar devices have already been developed to research organs including the lungs, intestines, liver, coronary heart and eyes.
Last yr, researchers at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Wyss Institute unveiled a “cervix-on-a-chip,” designed to mimic the construction and perform of the human cervix in a lot the same manner as the vaginal gadget.
Together, scientists imagine the gadgets might unlock solutions to some of girls’s health’s greatest mysteries.
Researchers are already seeing promising outcomes. In one research, scientists used the vagina chip to evaluate how healthy bacteria and BV-associated bacteria have an effect on vaginal tissue.
They discovered that helpful Lactobacillus bacteria lowered inflammation and maintained healthy acidity, while dangerous bacteria linked to BV triggered inflammation and tissue harm.
“It was very striking that the different microbial species produced such opposite effects on the human vaginal cells, and we were able to observe and measure those effects quite easily using our Vagina Chip,” Dr. Abidemi Junaid, a research scientist at the Wyss Institute and co-author of the research, said in a 2022 press release.
“The success of these studies demonstrate that this model can be used to test different combinations of microbes to help identify the best probiotic treatments for BV and other conditions.”
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