Placenta-on-a-chip to better understand pregnancy pathology and fetal drug safety.

The human placenta

Human ‘organs on chips’ are microchips lined by human cells, that has revolutionized and accelerated drug development and testing, disease modelling and personalize medicine. The concept ‘organs  on chips’ is a brain child of Donald Ingber,  director of biomedical research center at Harvard’s Wyss  Institute. His team was first to bring about marriage between electronic and biology to design ‘organs on chips’ [1]

In this series of ‘organs on chips’ researchers from NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development,[2] the University of Pennsylvania, Wayne State University/Detroit Medical Center, Seoul National University, and Asan Medical Center in South Korea researchers and their colleagues have developed a “placenta-on-a-chip” to study the maternal-fetal interface during pregnancy, its role in pregnancy physiology and pathology and drugs that cross the placental barrier.

On a microlevel, the flash drive size device mimics closely the structure of real placenta and all its selectiveness for allowing the passage of nutrients and harmful substances.

A placenta-on-a-chip microdevice A) The device’s upper (blue) and lower (red) chambers are separated by a semi-permeable membrane. B) Researchers placed maternal cells in one chamber and fetal cells in the other.

The microsystem consists of silicone device with two parallel polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)microfluidic channels separated by a porous membrane. On one side of those pores are human trophoblast cells and on the other side are human umbilical vein endothelial cells.

The team tested the chip by placing glucose in the maternal compartment and monitoring its movement to the fetal compartment. The glucose transfer mirrored what happens in the body, indicating the chip was an accurate model.[3]

The device was developed by a grant from the ‘March of Dimes’ to identify cause and prevention of preterm births. The study was published in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine.

Roberto Romero, M.D., chief of the NICHD’s Perinatology Research Branch and one of the study authors said “We believe that this technology may be used to address questions that are difficult to answer with current placenta model systems and help enable research on pregnancy and its complications.”

The new placenta will eliminate the need for animal models to study different dynamics of maternal/fetal interphase especially the exchange of endobiotics and xenobiotics.

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[1] https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/man-who-built-organs-chips

[2] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/researchers-design-placenta-chip-better-understand-pregnancy

[3] http://machinedesign.com/medical/placenta-chip-lets-researchers-better-understand-pregnancy

[4] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/14767058.2015.1038518