The Wyss Institute at Harvard University created a vaginal chip with the goal of finding cures for vaginosis, an infection that affects 30% of women of reproductive age.

The developed model uses donated cultured cells and embeds them in a silicone rubber chip to mimic the characteristics of the vaginal microbiome, allowing for a better understanding of the effects of the bacterial communities that live in the female genital tract.

With this information, scientists have new and better tools to find therapeutic solutions against bacterial vaginosis, which affects women between the ages of 15 and 44.

“One of the main obstacles was that there were no good preclinical models that could be used to study which therapies could actually cure BV in human tissues. “Our team’s project was to create a human vaginal chip that would help develop and test new therapies against bacterial vaginosis,” he said. Gulati shudderedCo-author of the study.

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How does the vaginal chip work?

This model is designed to simulate the female genitalia as closely as possible, thereby mimicking the vaginal tissue environment, including the microbial communities and interactions between changing hormones and bacteria.

In addition, the chip is formed by the vaginal epithelium, which is a group of cells that make up the outer surface of the body.

With all this configuration, they built a three-dimensional layout of the wall of the female organ, which added a positive response to the introduction of the sex hormone estrogen, indicating that it was sensitive to this type of component.

Another effect they achieved was the introduction of beneficial bacteria, which led to the healthy maintenance of epithelial cells. Upon introduction of harmful bacteria, epithelial cells were damaged, increasing pro-inflammatory cytokine levels and pH.

“It was very surprising that different microbial species produced such opposite effects on human vaginal cells, and we were able to observe and measure these effects quite easily using our vaginal chip,” he said. Abidem JunaidCo-author of the study.

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Wifi for health monitoring

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a way to monitor and identify respiratory problems in humans using Wi-Fi signals.

Taking advantage of the signals that this technology emits to guarantee an Internet connection, the researchers analyzed the changes in the waves that a person produces, for example, when coughing.

The researchers decided that their work is called BreatheSmartIt was intended to work with routers and devices already available in the market.

For its work, scientists used a single router and changed the firmware so that it checks more often the “channel status information” called CSI. Enables scanning up to 10 times per second to get a clear picture of any changes.

With this technical modification, the team began cheating testing that simulates various respiratory conditions and monitors changes in Wi-Fi signals.

Then they developed an algorithm that BreatheSmart Correctly identified simulated breathing conditions 99.54 percent of the time.

Those responsible for this research hope that the algorithm can be implemented by other developers so that they can implement it in some software and implement it in hardware that allows monitoring of breathing problems in people at home as additional data to study medical processes.

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