Artificial Female Reproductive Tract Opens New Health Frontiers | National Geographic

[Music] Avatar being a virtual representation of a human being, and in this case, it's a biological representation of the female reproductive tract. So, we call it Eva Tarr.

The system that we've invented together with Draper laboratories is a series of interconnecting cubes that have individual tubes that now connect each of the organs. So, we would have actual samples from enough, so we would have like a mouse ovary cultured on one of these strands. Well, the fluid can dynamically flow between all of these individual different compartments, just like each of our organs do, as if blood was carrying factors between different organs.

So, this would be the ovary. So, it's coming from here, going into here, and then flowing; it's a little miniature ovary. So, we actually have either the individual follicles from the ovary, and a follicle in the ovary are the cells that make the hormones like estrogen and progesterone, together with the O site, or we can actually have the entire ovary there.

That allows us to control the hormones over a 28-day menstrual cycle in a box. So, understanding how the uterus responds to hormones is really important. There is no animal model for a lot of the stuff that we study, and so the human is really the perfect model to study the end, the human endometrium, the uterus, and the diseases that are associated with it.

We were able to actually acquire primary human tissue from women who were having surgeries for different menstrual or reproductive related problems. This is the first time we've been able to model the entire reproductive hormone profile, and that profile of menstrual cycle hormones now allows us to connect those dynamic hormones to downstream tissues like the fallopian tube, uterus, cervix, together with a liver.

That integration now will allow us to understand better about the reproductive tract itself, which we don't have good models for, as well as reproductive diseases. So, now this is going to allow us to test drugs for individuals. So, we'll be able to eventually make individual organs from each person.

So, we'll be able to do personalized medicine. It's really going to open a whole new world of reproductive health testing. [Music]