AsianScientist (Aug. 16, 2018) – Scientists in China have developed a placenta-on-a-chip that could lead to a better understanding of how bacterial infections in pregnant women can promote preterm delivery. They published their findings in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering.
More than one in ten babies worldwide are born prematurely, according to the World Health Organization. Bacterial infections can cause inflammation of the placenta or the placental barrier, a membrane that regulates the flow of nutrients and other substances between mother and child. This in turn could lead to preterm delivery.
Because it is not feasible to run clinical trials that include pregnant women and human placentas donated after birth can only survive a few hours, studying the association between bacterial infection and preterm delivery has proven tricky.
To overcome this limitation, researchers led by Professor Qin Jianhua at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, China, developed a microfluidic device that allows placental cells to grow and function as if they were still in the body. The researchers implanted human trophoblasts (representing the mother’s cells) and endothelial cells (representing the fetus) from a human umbilical cord vein onto opposite sides of a three-layer microfluidic device.
A porous membrane between the two cell layers allowed the tissues to form a placental barrier between them. After determining that the barrier was functioning in a similar way as it would in the body, the researchers added Escherichia coli bacteria to the maternal layer. The bacteria proliferated rapidly, breached the placental barrier and subsequently triggered inflammation and cell death in both of the adjoining maternal and fetal layers.
The researchers concluded that placental barriers-on-a-chip could help explain inflammatory responses in the human placenta and possibly lead to better ways to treat or prevent preterm birth caused by infections.
The article can be found at: Qin et al. (2018) Placental Barrier-on-a-chip: Modeling Placental Inflammatory Responses to Bacterial Infection.
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Source: American Chemical Society; Photo: Shutterstock.
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