Researchers Design Placenta-on-a-Chip to Better Understand Pregnancy
NIH team and colleagues believe microdevice may improve upon existing placenta modelsNational Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers and their colleagues have developed a “placenta-on-a-chip” to study the inner workings of the human placenta and its role in pregnancy. The device was designed to imitate, on a micro-level, the structure and function of the placenta and model the transfer of nutrients from mother to fetus. This prototype is one of the latest in a series of organ-on-a-chip technologies developed to accelerate biomedical advances. The study, published online in The Journal of