What can we learn from studying an organ on a chip?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

There's a lot experts still don't understand about endometriosis, where the tissue that lines the uterus and sheds monthly grows outside the uterus, often causing intense pain and infertility.

Now, MIT researchers are studying that living tissue on plastic chips in the lab. It's part of what the

university is calling a moon shot for menstruation science, funded by a $10 million grant to study

women's reproductive health. This organ-on-a-chip approach has been gaining traction with the phase

out of animal testing.

Linda Griffith is a bioengineer at MIT leading this effort.

So organs on chips refers to the process of taking cells usually from patients, like we get samples of a patient's endometrium.

We store it in the lab, and then we have something called

a microfluidic platform that we invented, where we use tissue engineering approaches to grow

a little model of the patient's tissue. So we break her cells down into individual cells, grow them up and make

a tissue bank, and then reconstruct them to resemble whatever it is we want to study. And mostly,

we study endometriosis lesions. What avenues of research does this open up that weren't available before?

Most of disease processes have traditionally been studied. First, you look at the patient,

you learn as much as you can from the patient, but then diseases are modeled in animals.

And since endometriosis and other gynecology diseases are chronic inflammatory

diseases that involve very, very particular things about the human immune system, we can learn

some phenomena from trying to replicate it in mice or other animals, but we really have

to study human tissue and human immunology. So we need to build the human patient in the lab

to capture the features that make the disease a human disease.

...