To chip the placenta. RUDN University researcher wins a competition for young scientists with a cell model

Project participants

• Olga Lazareva, Researcher, Laboratory of Molecular Pathophysiology, Research Institute of Molecular and Cellular Medicine, RUDN University Medical Institute;
• Polina Vishnyakova, Head of the Laboratory of Regenerative Medicine, National Medical Research Center of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology named after Academician V. I. Kulakov, Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Pathophysiology, RUDN Research Institute of Molecular and Cellular Medicine;
• Evgeny Knyazev, Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Physiology, Associate Professor of the Basic Department of the Shemyakin–Ovchinnikov Institute of bioorganic chemistry RAS, Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, National Research University Higher School of Economics;
• Dmitry Kolesov, Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Biophotonics at National Medical Research Center of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology named after Academician V. I. Kulakov, Gynecology and Perinatology, Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Cellular Stress at the Scientific Research Institute of General Pathology and Pathophysiology.

The research team is developing a technology for modeling pregnancy pathologies and in vitro testing of transplacental transport — “on-a-chip-placenta”.

"Using microfluidic technology, we have recreated a three-layer model of the placenta, repeating the structure of the chorionic villi containing trophoblast cells, macrophages and endothelial cells. Previously, such models included only two types of cells, which did not fully reflect the actual physiology of the organ and the important role of the immune system for its normal functioning. Microfluidic technologies have emerged as a revolutionary achievement in the field of biomedicine, transforming the approach to modeling the physiology of individual human organs and cellular analysis of the processes occurring in them. These technologies use channels with micrometer sizes to manipulate small volumes of fluids, which makes it possible to simulate blood flow in an organ and observe complex biological interactions in vitro," Olga Lazareva, researcher at the Laboratory of Molecular Pathophysiology at the Research Institute of Molecular and Cellular Medicine of the RUDN University Medical Institute.

Modeling pregnancy pathologies on a developed “placenta-on-a-chip”, if not excludes, then complements the expensive preclinical stage of testing on model laboratory animals and the clinical stage of testing on patients, which is often not feasible in the case of pregnant women.

Read about the development in the Izvestia.