Harvard scientists have been honored for creating the world’s first “vagina-on-a-chip,” a groundbreaking device that mimics the female reproductive tract using living human cells.
The tiny lab-grown model allows researchers to better study the vaginal microbiome, including the effects of hormones, healthy bacteria, infections and possible treatments — all without experimenting on mice, which don’t have the same hormonal changes as humans.
“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 device, told The Post.
Earlier this month, Izadifar received the £50,000 Lush Prize 2026 for Science in recognition of the invention, which experts are calling a major breakthrough in the long-overlooked field of women’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 device is made from a permeable plastic membrane designed to replicate the structure of the vaginal wall. Scientists seed the chip with donated human cells taken from the vagina, allowing living tissue to grow inside the device.
“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 size of a USB drive, the chip contains tiny electrical sensors that let scientists monitor how human tissue reacts in real time to infections, medications and environmental changes.
Researchers say the technology is significant because women’s reproductive health studies have long depended on animal testing — despite major biological differences between animals and humans.
“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.”
Those differences have complicated efforts to study conditions tied to fertility, pregnancy 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 especially frustrating for scientists studying bacterial vaginosis, or BV — a common infection caused by bacterial imbalance in the vagina and cervix that affects more than a quarter of reproductive-age women 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 result, researchers have struggled to test new interventions for BV, which can be cleared up with antibiotics, though up to 80% of women experience a recurrence within a year 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 annually by the beauty company Lush Cosmetics in collaboration with the campaigning research group Ethical Consumer.
The rise of organs-on-a-chip
The vagina isn’t the first body part to get the “on-a-chip” treatment. Similar devices have already been developed to study organs including the lungs, intestines, liver, heart and eyes.
Last year, researchers at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Wyss Institute unveiled a “cervix-on-a-chip,” designed to mimic the structure and function of the human cervix in much the same way as the vaginal device.
Together, scientists believe the gadgets could unlock answers to some of women’s health’s biggest mysteries.
Researchers are already seeing promising results. In one study, scientists used the vagina chip to compare how healthy bacteria and BV-associated bacteria affect vaginal tissue.
They found that beneficial Lactobacillus bacteria reduced inflammation and maintained healthy acidity, while harmful bacteria linked to BV triggered inflammation and tissue damage.
“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 study, 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.”
