Bunch of new Placenta in chip devices can help making pregnancies safe

Source: The post is based on the article “Bunch of new Placenta in chip devices can help making pregnancies safe”  published in Department of Science and Technology’s website.

What is the News?

Researchers have developed a device called placenta-on-a-chip (POC).This device mimics the placenta at various stages of pregnancy.

What is Placenta?

The placenta is an organ that develops in the uterus during pregnancy. It performs duties for most of the foetus’s organs while they are still forming, such as providing oxygen while the lungs develop and nutrition while the gut is forming.

Placenta shields the baby from harmful drugs and chemicals. But some can still cross this barrier and cause harm to the baby in the womb. Thus, pregnant women are not given most medications and they continue to suffer. 

Determining which medicines can be given during pregnancy that would not cross the placenta is a daunting task. Animal studies (mostly on mice) don’t provide definitive answers due to differences between human and mouse placentas. 

As a result, the number of medicines declared safe for pregnant women is low and marking new medicines that come into the market as “pregnancy safe” is a challenge.

What have the researchers developed?

Researchers have developed a device called placenta-on-a-chip(POC).This device imitates different stages of pregnancy such as blood flow and cell interactions.

This can help in studying various stages of pregnancy which in turn can help in drug discovery, study of toxicity of chemicals like caffeine and understanding the effects of conditions such as preeclampsia and diabetes mellitus during pregnancy.