Major new NIH investment in women’s health science arrives at MIT
NIH to fund Technology Development Center for women’s health
Disclosure: The author conducts undergraduate research associated with Linda Griffith at MIT and has collaborated with Griffith on women’s health outreach initiatives. Griffith does not fund the author’s research position.
Women’s health diseases are not uncommon. For example, endometriosis — a disease in which tissue similar to the uterine lining forms painful lesions outside of the uterus — affects roughly one in ten women worldwide. Yet, key aspects of how endometriosis and other female-skewed diseases develop and progress remain difficult to study, and research in the area receives comparatively limited funding.
With a new $3-million-per-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Professor Linda Griffith aims to address these challenges through a new Technology Development Center for women’s health at MIT.
Using Griffith’s work on endometriosis and background in tissue engineering, the Center will develop new experimental platforms, including “organ-on-chip” systems, that could reshape how scientists investigate a wide range of female-skewed diseases.
A persistent gap in biomedical research
Researchers still lack reliable laboratory models that capture how endometriosis develops in the human body. Without robust knowledge of the molecular mechanisms behind it, however, it is difficult to identify targets for new pharmaceuticals or even explain why the disease begins. As a result, patients often wait years for a diagnosis only to learn that there is still no cure.
Endometrial lesions often cause severe pain, chronic inflammation, and infertility. For many women with endometriosis, treatment is a tangle of side effects from hormonal drugs that may alleviate some of these symptoms, but don’t stop the disease. Surgery can be used to remove lesions and rescue fertility, but such procedures cannot address any underlying cause.
And oftentimes, the lesions regrow. In the worst cases, a patient’s only option is a hysterectomy to completely remove the uterus.
For Griffith, these challenges reflect a bigger problem in biomedical research: diseases associated with women’s reproductive health have historically received less attention and fewer technological resources.
In coverage by the New York Times, Griffith described her goal as shifting the conversation about endometriosis “from one of women’s pain to one of biomarkers, genetics, and molecular networks.”
The new Technology Development Center seeks to accelerate that shift by creating technologies capable of modeling these diseases in unprecedented detail.
Engineering human biology in the lab
Central to the effort will be microphysiological systems, often called “organs-on-chips.” These engineered devices use living human cells arranged in three-dimensional structures to mimic the behavior of real tissues — a technique that could resolve major gaps in current methods.
For instance, traditional mouse models cannot give researchers a full picture of endometriosis because mice do not menstruate, and their immune systems are too different from ours. But by incorporating microfluidic channels that control the flow of nutrients, drugs, and signaling molecules in these organs-on-chips, these platforms can reproduce aspects of human physiology that experiments with existing animal models cannot.
For diseases like endometriosis in which hormones, immune responses, and inflammatory agents interact dynamically over long periods, such complexity is essential for accurate modeling and investigation. Griffith plans for researchers at the center to continue developing methods similar to these organs-on-chips to study endometrial lesions and other female-skewed diseases in a physiologically relevant environment. This could allow scientists to study disease progression and test new therapies in ways that have previously been considered impossible.
The work builds on decades of advances in tissue engineering, both through Griffith’s own work at MIT and in the larger biomedical field. Griffith, a pioneer of engineered organ systems, helped develop some of the earliest organ-on-chip technologies, including liver models designed to improve drug testing.
A changing landscape for women’s health
The new Technology Development Center begins its work during a period of broader uncertainty around federal research funding for many corners of basic and translational research science, as well as ongoing national debates about reproductive health policy.
Against this backdrop, NIH investment in Griffith’s research at MIT represents a significant national interest in building scientific infrastructure for studying women’s health. While Griffith and others have been pioneering innovation in this field for decades, initiatives like the Technology Development Center suggest the field may be entering a new period of large-scale visibility and investment.
At MIT, the grant also signals that endometriosis and other female-skewed diseases are emerging as research areas that students here may increasingly have the opportunity to pursue. In this way, the center could shape not only how researchers address questions in women’s health, but also who gets to be a part of its next generation.
MIT could become an even stronger hub for engineering-driven, interdisciplinary approaches to female-skewed disease — uniquely positioning the Institute at the crest of a wave toward a future where healthcare reflects far greater prioritization of women.
And while the Center’s explicit mission focuses on women’s health, Griffith believes its technologies will have much broader applications across chronic inflammatory disease, autoimmune disorders, and metabolic conditions.
By developing new technologies to study complex biological systems, Griffith hopes innovation driven by urgency around women’s health can advance biomedical science broadly — and in doing so, demonstrate the importance of devoting resources to women’s health research. As she often puts it, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Elizabeth LaCroix contributed to fact-checking this article.