Professor Jungho Ahn’s Research Team Develops the World’s First “Patient-Specific Endometrium-on-a-Chip” to Overcome Infertility

– Precise three-dimensional reconstruction of patient-derived uterine cells on a chip enables quantitative prediction of implantation potential
– Enables selection of personalized therapeutics and monitoring of treatment efficacy, opening a new horizon in infertility treatment

▲ (From left) Professor Jungho Ahn; Professor Youn Jung Kang, CHA University; Gaeun Lee, PhD student; Yukyung Lee, PhD student, CHA University; Hwa Sun Koo, Director, Best of Me Women’s Clinic for Infertility

Professor Jungho Ahn’s research team in the Department of Biophysics, in collaboration with Professor Youn Jung Kang’s team at CHA University, has developed the world’s first “patient-derived endometrium-on-a-chip (EoC)” platform that precisely recreates a patient’s uterine tissue on a chip to diagnose infertility and propose personalized treatment strategies. This study has attracted significant attention from the academic community for opening a path toward individualized treatment for patients with infertility and recurrent implantation failure, conditions that have long been difficult to predict.

The endometrium is the tissue in which a fertilized embryo implants and develops, and it must reach an optimal state during a specific period, known as the “window of implantation,” to accept the embryo. This condition is referred to as “endometrial receptivity.” Conventional diagnostic methods have relied on limited indicators, such as measuring endometrial thickness or blood flow. As a result, they have struggled to accurately reflect individual patient characteristics and to reliably predict actual implantation potential.

To address these limitations, the research team fabricated a microchip by stacking patient-derived cells in three dimensions to create an environment closely resembling the actual endometrium. The chip precisely mimics the patient’s uterine environment and is equipped with a system that quantitatively scores implantation potential (ERS2) by assessing how effectively an embryo can adhere. Through this system, clinicians can determine at a glance whether a patient is currently in a condition suitable for pregnancy or which aspects require improvement, based on quantitative indicators.

Notably, the newly developed platform goes beyond diagnosis to enable “personalized treatment prediction” by identifying the most suitable therapeutic agents for individual patients. Using the platform, the research team compared responses to various treatment drugs and found that a specific drug (CXCL12) was most effective in promoting angiogenesis and restoring receptivity in patients with intrauterine adhesions. Furthermore, by tracking actual patient treatment processes on the chip, the team confirmed a significant increase in implantation success scores before and after treatment, thereby demonstrating the platform’s effectiveness.

Professor Jungho Ahn stated, “This study is meaningful in that it opens a way to more accurately predict individual implantation potential by precisely recreating actual patient tissue on a chip.” He added, “It represents the first case in which advanced organ-on-a-chip technology has been implemented as a model that can be directly applied to patient treatment in real clinical settings, rather than remaining confined to the laboratory, and it is expected to contribute to improving the success rate of infertility treatment.”

The research findings were published on November 25 in the international scientific journal Nature Communications (Impact Factor 15.7) and were supported by research funding programs from the National Research Foundation of Korea and the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

※ Paper Title: Microengineered patient-derived endometrium-on-a-chip for the evaluation of endometrial receptivity and personalised translational medicine

※ Journal: Nature communications

※ DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-65406-7