Great questions..
1. Biggest challenge was to recapitulate out the dynamic microenvironment which vaginal epithelium experience. In this model after several iterations we developed and used the workflow of episodic flow in the epithelium compartment. This helped with growth of epithelium and bacteria.
2. Organ chip provides a great tool to recapitulate patient responses in vitro and offers attractive solution for personalized medicine testing. This commercially available chip and platform is cell agnostic and provides an opportunity to build your own model. And your approach of using patient cancer cells and tumor microenvironment will fit within the realms of organ chip.