You may have noticed two things not linked here in the title of the article. First, EVAT. You must be thinking if it is the sequel to AVATAR. But wait. It is not. Now coming to the second: a mini female reproductive system on a 3D chip. If you’re assuming it’s a sci-fi plot, you’d be wrong again.
It is a new-age technology that can generate artificial organs on 3D chips. EVATAR is a mini female reproductive system running on a 3D microfluidic chip. The model has all the essential elements of a female reproductive system, including the menstrual cycle. Yes, you read it right. The 3D chip is made of little boxes. And each box plays an equally important role in effectively recreating a female reproductive system. These boxes make up the fallopian tubes, ovaries, cervix, vagina, and uterus, just like the reproductive system of an adult woman.
Scientists have used human stem cells to create EVATAR tissues, with the exception of the ovaries, where mouse stem cells were used. All the mini organs are connected to each other by mini tubes and pumps. The pumps play an important role in stimulating blood flow and eventually complete the reproductive system. The scientists also added certain hormones to the model to stimulate the ovaries to create the hormones estrogen and progesterone. The idea is to release an egg.
Now you must be thinking about what these scientists were thinking when they came up with such a tool! Actually, they planned to use this model as a personalized device to understand critical female diseases associated with the reproductive system. They also wanted to determine the efficacy of clinically available drugs to treat these diseases. Apart from that, with EVATAR they could also find out why a certain drug acts differently in different people.
Many scientists have previously pointed out that decreased accessibility to human organs is one of the main reasons we have limited scope to treat critical illness. And this is true for many diseases and disorders. Teresa Woodruff, lead author of the study at Northwestern University, explained: “If you had your stem cells and created a heart, a liver, a lung and an ovary, you could try 10 different drugs at 10 different doses and say, ‘Here’s the drug that will help you with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or diabetes. It’s the ultimate personalized medicine, a model of your body to test drugs.”
EVATAR is part of a larger project conducted by the National Institutes of Health. The goal is to develop a “body on a chip” model. The goal behind the creation of EVATAR is to build personalized models of the female reproductive system that will help researchers understand conditions such as infertility, ovarian cancer, fibroids, endometriosis, etc. The team is now working on recreating a male reproductive system on a 3D chip. And they would call it ADATAR, which is also part of the National Institutes of Health project. The idea is to study both models and discover the differences in drug metabolism between women and men.