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Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute are building model uteruses the size of a thumbdrive to diagnose heavy menstrual bleeding, after receiving a grant from the non-profit Wellcome Leap last month.

The Institute received funding from Wellcome Leap’s $50 million Missed Vital Sign initiative, launched specifically to address heavy menstrual bleeding — which affects one in three women, according to the non-profit.

The institute has built more than 20 types of organs-on-chips, or miniature models of human organs lined with living cells, to study subjects ranging from asthma to intestinal microbiomes, since 2010. With the funding from Wellcome Leap, the team has three years to apply the organ-on-chip approach to model heavy menstrual bleeding, also known as menorrhagia.

Donald E. Ingber, the institute’s founding director and a professor at Harvard Medical School, serves as the project’s principal investigator, as he does for all “organ chip” studies. He called heavy menstrual bleeding a “hidden scourge.”

“Some women have it so bad they need to go to the hospital and get blood transfusions,” Ingber said, adding that despite the condition’s prevalence, diagnosis often takes five years.

“Heavy menstrual bleeding is really a worldwide problem,” said Abidemi Junaid, the project’s lead scientist. “There is not much known about it and even having a test for it is not really common.”

To address this gap, Ingber, Junaid, and a small team plan to build roughly three hundred organ chips, according to Junaid. Scientists will test the chips’ outflows to determine potential biomarkers of heavy menstrual bleeding, such as genetic mutations, reproductive microbiomes, immune responses, and hypoxia.

“We can flow whole human blood through these chips,” Ingber said.

Lisa Smeester, the project’s program manager, said that the organ-chip model will speed up the discovery process by acting as a substitute for extensive human datasets.

“We can perfuse fluids through them,” Smeester said. “We can put stress and shear on them to get them to contract and move the same way organs in our body do.”

“It’s a lot easier to fine-tune conditions in the organ chip than trying to find different study subjects,” she added. “It’s a way to speed up the process.”

The institute will partner with the other international research teams funded by the Missed Vital Sign program to develop tools for both diagnosing and treating heavy menstrual bleeding.

“I would love to see continued government funding, but moving forward, philanthropic organizations, business partnerships, individual donors — I really am hopeful that these kinds of funding mechanisms that are often contract-based are really going to pick up the slack where we currently have deficiencies,” Smeester said.

The Trump administration has canceled or paused billions in research grants since taking power in January. While much of the funding to Harvard-affiliated researchers has been restored after a judge ruled a Harvard-specific freeze was unconstitutional, broader cuts at the National Institutes of Health have been allowed to proceed.

On top of developing a menstrual organ-chip, the Wyss Institute’s Women Health Catalyst is pursuing 35 other initiatives to study conditions from endometriosis to ovarian cancer.

“The idea is really to do more research in women’s health because that’s something sadly in the past that wasn’t really the main focus,” Junaid said.

According to Smeester, researchers need to show that women’s health is “worth funding.”

“Women’s health doesn’t just impact women,” Smeester said. “It impacts productivity in the workforce, caring for families, and so it really should be something that more broadly is promoted and supported in funding mechanisms.”

—Staff writer Wyeth Renwick can be reached at wyeth.renwick@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @wzrenwick.

—Staff writer Nirja J. Trivedi can be reached at nirja.trivedi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nirjatriv.