Microfluidic Vagina Chip for Studying the Vaginal Microbiome

February 16, 2024

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

01:28 min

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Seeding Organ Chips with Human Uterine Fibroblasts (HUFs) for Studying Living Vaginal Microbiome

02:46 min

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Connecting Human Uterine Fibroblast-Seeded Organ Chips to Pods and Differentiation of Vaginal Epithelial Cells for Studying Living Vaginal Microbiome

02:17 min

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Bacterial Inoculation of Organ Chips with Differentiated Human Vaginal Epithelial Cells for Studying Living Vaginal Microbiome Under Microaerophilic Conditions

01:56 min

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Aakanksha Gulati, Alicia Jorgenson, Abidemi Junaid, Donald E. Ingber^2,3

¹Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering,Harvard University, ²Vascular Biology Program and Department of Surgery,Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, ³Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Summary

This article describes a protocol for creating a microfluidic vagina-on-a-chip (Vagina Chip) culture device that enables the study of human host interactions with a living vaginal microbiome under microaerophilic conditions. This chip can be used as a tool to investigate vaginal diseases as well as to develop and test potential therapeutic countermeasures.