Entire Female Reproductive Tract replicated on a chip: Revolutionizing future drug development and personalized disease treatment for women.

Courtesy: Draper labs 

Researchers at Northwestern Medicine, Draper and University of Illinois has developed a miniature female reproductive tract that fits in the palm of your hand and mimics the normal 28 days’ menstrual cycle. The new system named ‘EVATAR’ was unveiled on Tuesday, March 28^th2017.

The research was also published online 28 March 2017 in Journal Nature Communications.

EVATAR CHIP ENLARGED 

The EVATAR offers unprecedented opportunities in the field of personalized medicine for women. It contains five mini-organs: a uterus, vagina, liver, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. The tablet size chip is studded with Lego-like blocks, each block containing human tissue growing on plastic scaffolding in microfluidic environment. The tissue for fallopian tube, uterus and cervix, comes from women who have undergone hysterectomies.  Only the ovarian tissue is of murine origin as ovaries are rarely removed in healthy women (murine and human primary follicles behave similarly in static culture). The blocks are connected by miniature tubes and channels simulating organ to organ integration of hormonal signals in a manner similar to ovulation, menstrual cycle and pregnancy.

By providing the ovarian block with right combination of FSH and LH the researchers were able to simulate ovulation Follicular hormones were also secreted as in normal 28 days’ cycle. The fallopian tube and Endometrial tissue also showed normal cycle changes in response to ovarian stimulation upstream.

The EVATAR was stable and functioned properly for 100 days.

Teresa Woodruff, a reproductive scientist and director of the Women’s Health Research Institute at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine said “This is nothing short of a revolutionary technology. If I had your stem cells and created a heart, liver, lung and an ovary, I could test 10 different drugs at 10 different doses on you and say, ‘Here’s the drug that will help your Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or diabetes.’. It’s the ultimate personalized medicine, a model of your body for testing drugs.”

“This will help us develop individualized treatments and see how females may metabolize drugs differently from males,” Woodruff said.

“This mimic what actually happens in the body,” Woodruff said. “In 10 years, this technology, called microfluidics, will be the prevailing technology for biological research.”

According to the newsletter by Northwestern University “For the project, Woodruff developed the ovaries; Julie Kim, the Susy Y. Hung Research Professor and an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Feinberg, the uterus; Spiro Getsios, assistant professor in dermatology and cell and molecular biology at Feinberg, developed the cervix and vagina and Joanna Burdette, of UIC, developed the fallopian tubes. The liver also is included in the system because it metabolizes drugs.”

This breakthrough is going to open new avenues to treat endometriosis, fibroids and some cancers, all of which are hormonally driven. Currently they all lack effective medical treatment options.

It also presents the researchers with the opportunities to test millions of compounds in the environment and new pharmaceuticals specifically in females.

“One of the reasons this technology has not advanced in the past is no one had solved the universal media problem,” Woodruff said. “We reasoned that organs in the body are in one medium — the blood — so we created a simple version of the blood and allowed the tissues to communicate via the medium.”

The EVATAR project is a part of a larger National Institutes of Health effort to create 'a body on a chip' in the US. In the last five years, the US government has spent over $100 million on the technology.

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