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| 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.
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| 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.
[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
