Can a lab-grown placenta protect unborn babies? Top scientists have built one to find out

For decades, doctors have had to prescribe medicines during pregnancy with surprisingly little evidence about whether many of them reach the developing foetus via the placenta, the temporary organ that connects a mother and her unborn baby. Or whether it is indeed an effective barrier against microbes and toxins. Now, researchers from Mumbai’s ICMR-National Institute for Research on Women’s Health (ICMR-NIRWoH) and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have developed a placenta-on-chip that closely mimics the human placenta.

This offers scientists a new way to study how drugs, nutrients, pollutants and infectious agents pass from mother to baby. Although it remains a laboratory research tool that requires further validation, researchers believe it could accelerate the development of pregnancy-safe therapeutics and provide new insights into conditions such as gestational diabetes, foetal growth restriction and pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure that damages organs).

The human-cell-based platform recreates several key structural and functional features of the placenta and could  reduce dependence on animal models, which often fail to accurately replicate human pregnancy. The study was led by researchers Anshul Bhide and Sourav Mukherjee under the supervision of Professor Deepak Modi (ICMR-NIRWoH) and Professor Abhijit Majumder (IIT Bombay).

Why is a placenta model significant?

The placenta is one of the most critical organs in pregnancy. Yet it is one of the least understood. It supplies oxygen and nutrients to the foetus, removes waste products, produces hormones essential for sustaining pregnancy and acts as a selective barrier, determining what passes from the mother’s bloodstream to the developing baby. How well the placenta functions influences foetal growth, pregnancy outcomes and the safety of medicines prescribed during pregnancy.

What is a placenta-on-chip?

Despite its name, it is not an electronic computer chip. It is a transparent plastic device containing a porous membrane on which researchers grow human placental cells alongside human endothelial cells, which line blood vessels. Together, these recreate the interface through which nutrients, hormones and other molecules are exchanged between mother and foetus.

Unlike many existing placenta-on-chip systems that require sophisticated microfluidic equipment, the Mumbai team’s model is a static two-chamber platform that can be used in a standard laboratory, making it simpler, reproducible and more accessible. Explaining the concept, Anshul Bhide, from ICMR-NIRWoH, told The Indian Express: “We tried to recreate the placenta to provide researchers a more humanised platform to better understand pregnancy and improve maternal and foetal health.” The project took more than three-and-a-half years to complete, beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic, and has been built entirely using human cells.

What makes this model different?

Bhide says the team demonstrated how the device reproduces the placenta’s cellular architecture, produces the pregnancy hormone beta-human chorionic gonadotropin (ß-hCG), mimics glucose transport from mother to foetus, and forms a functional  barrier capable of selectively transporting molecules while reproducing several physiological functions of the human placenta. “Our device is able to mimic the human placenta at structural, cellular, hormonal and functional levels. We also recreated the process by which urea is transported back into the maternal blood.”

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What did the researchers find?

After validating that the device behaved like the human placenta, the team recreated a hyperglycaemia-like condition in which maternal blood glucose levels are elevated. They found that glucose transport across the placental barrier increased under these conditions and that the placental barrier itself was altered — findings consistent with previous studies showing increased glucose transfer across the placenta during maternal hyperglycaemia. “The present study focuses on functional transport outcomes, and future investigations will be needed to understand the molecular mechanisms behind this,” Bhide said.

How could this benefit mothers and babies?

The platform’s biggest potential application lies in improving pregnancy research and making medicines safer. “During pregnancy, we often cannot prescribe medicines because we do not know whether they will cross the placental barrier. Since our device functions like the human placenta, we can now use it to study drug transport to see how much of a medicine crosses the placenta and whether it reaches the baby,” Bhide said.

Beyond medicines, its major application would be drug studies but it can also be used to study the impact of pollutants and infectious diseases on placental function. “If a virus or bacterium emerges, we can study whether it crosses the placenta and infects the baby. These kinds of studies can now be carried out on this device,” said Prof Modi.