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 The organoids - miniature functional cellular models of the human
placenta's earliest stages - will also allow researchers to explore
what makes a pregnancy healthy, and how certain diseases can pass
from a mother to a developing baby.
The human placenta supplies all the oxygen and nutrients essential
for growth of a foetus. If it fails to develop properly, pregnancy
can fail and end in stillbirth or miscarriage, or babies can be born
with developmental problems.
Ashley Moffett, a professor at Cambridge University's pathology,
physiology, development and neuroscience department who co-led the
work, explained that while the placenta is absolutely essential for
supporting a baby as it grows inside the mother, researchers know
relatively little about it because of a lack of good experimental
models.
"It's the first organ that develops, yet it's also the least
understood," she told reporters at a briefing.
The field of organoid science has blossomed in recent years, with
research teams growing everything from mini-brains to mini-livers to
mini-lungs and using them to gain greater understanding of human
biology and disease.
DECADES OF RESEARCH
The Cambridge team, whose latest work was published in the journal
Nature, began their efforts to grow human placental cells more than
30 years ago when Moffett and colleagues were studying cellular
events in the first few weeks of pregnancy.
The team gradually developed ways to isolate and characterize
placental cells, and eventually found the right combination of
harvested cells and an organoid culture system to enable the
generation of mini placenta models.
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"We've been trying to do this for years," Moffett said.
Graham Burton, who also worked on this research, said the
mini-placenta success should also shed light on other
poorly-understood aspects of relationships between the placenta, the
uterus and the foetus. These include how the placenta prevents some
infections passing from the mother's blood to the baby, but fails to
stop others, such as the Zika virus, for example.
The organoids may also be used for safety screening of drugs for
possible use in early pregnancy, and to deepen understanding of how
chromosomal abnormalities can disrupt normal development.
Vivian Li, a specialist at Britain's Francis Crick Institute not
involved in this work, said it was an "exciting" step.
"These mini-placentas are generated in small-scale, and certainly
cannot be used for making babies in a dish. But the ability to
culture (them) in the dish has opened up the possibilities for more
complex studies," she said in an emailed statement.
(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Gareth Jones)
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