THE ESSENTIAL
- Bacterial vaginosis is the most common vaginal infection.
- This infection is more common in women with a sexually transmitted infection, multiple partners, or having an intrauterine device.
Generally, bacterial vaginosis is treated with antibiotics. But American researchers may have found a new solution to cure this disease: a vagina on a chip! The results obtained in clinical trials are encouraging. Their work has been published in the journal Microbiome.
The vagina on chip to better study the human vagina
The vagina on chip is a new form of organ on chip, that is to say a miniaturized system which makes it possible to reproduce the functionality of an organ. Here, it is therefore the vagina that the researchers have recreated. But why ?
In this study, the objective was to better understand the human vagina through this device in order to cure vaginal infections such as bacterial vaginosis. According to MSD ManualIt’s about a “vaginal infection that occurs when the balance of vaginal bacteria is upset”. This can cause serious complications, such as pelvic inflammatory disease, that is to say an infection that affects the female reproductive organs, or even, in pregnant women, an infection of the membranes that surround the fetus.
The researchers therefore developed a vagina on a chip from the vaginal cells of women. The final product therefore replicates the microenvironment of human vaginal tissues, including its microbiota, as well as many physiological characteristics of the vagina. This small technology can be inoculated with different strains of bacteria to study their effects on the vagina on a chip and therefore on the human vagina.
The same reactions as the human vagina
“Our human vaginal chip offers an interesting solution to study host-microbiome interactions and accelerate the development of potential probiotic treatments”, explain Gautam Mahajan, one of the authors. Currently, it is difficult to perform clinical trials on vaginal infections because the human vaginal microbiome is very different from that of common animal models.
On humans, usually, the vaginal flora of a woman is composed of many non-pathogenic bacteria, including lactobacilli which control the pH of the vagina and allow, in part, to avoid the development of bacteria responsible for infections. But when a woman has bacterial vaginosis, there is a decrease in the number of protective lactobacilli.
So when scientists put strains of lactobacillus bacteria into the vagina on a chip, there was a decrease in inflammation. In contrast, when they put bacteria responsible for the vaginal infection in the vagina on chip, there were consequences on the pH and an increase in the inflammatory response. In other words, the chip reacted in the same way as the human vagina.
Thanks to this vagina on a chip, researchers will therefore be able to better study vaginal inflammatory diseases and perhaps, in the long term, develop new treatments. “By developing these chips, it also makes it possible to see how the microbiota [vaginal] behaves in front of this or that bacterium, explains Dr. Odile Bagot, gynecologist, to Doctissimo. Finally, this offers the possibility of studying the reactions of the vaginal mucosa according to the inflammation according to the germ present and to determine the really effective probiotics.“.