Tissue Processing and Isolation of Primary Fibroblasts from the Human Vagina

Pelvic organ prolapse is a disorder that seriously impacts the quality of life of women. It occurs when muscles and ligaments weaken and cause pelvic organs to drop lower in the pelvis, creating a bulge in the vagina. Surgery to correct pelvic organ prolapse has been a mainstay treatment. Recently, there has been growing interest in studying the tissue composition of patients with prolapse at the cellular level. There is currently little consensus regarding the effect of donor or patient age on cell-based therapies. Current published protocols for vaginal fibroblast isolation either concentrate on premenopausal tissue or neglect to comment on the age of donor tissue. Most existing protocols use animal models. The consistency of human vaginal tissue is denser than the tissues used in most protocols. In this study, human vaginal tissue was obtained primarily from older donors, which likely contributed to the failure of existing protocols. The aim of this study is to describe a standard protocol for reliably acquiring human vaginal fibroblasts, regardless of donor age and menopausal status. Results were reproduced using tissue from nine separate donors who underwent pelvic organ prolapse surgery. Six patients were postmenopausal, with the oldest donor being 78 years old. The median age of the tissue donors was 59. Here, we describe a reliable method for generating a fibroblast-enriched single-cell suspension using a combination of enzymatic and mechanical dissociation and cell suspension pooling of multiple vaginal biopsies from a single donor. Reliable isolation of human vaginal primary fibroblasts may be useful in the study of pelvic organ prolapse as well as microbiome-host interactions.