Indian scientists from IIT Bombay and the Indian Council of Medical Research have developed an indigenous “placenta‑on‑chip” platform that recreates key functions of the human placental barrier, offering a powerful new tool for studying maternal–foetal health. The miniature device uses living human cells to model how nutrients, hormones, drugs and waste products move between mother and foetus under controlled laboratory conditions, helping researchers probe pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia, gestational diabetes and foetal growth restriction.
The study was led by Dr Deepak Modi, Scientist at the Indian Council of Medical Research’s National Institute for Research on Women’s Health (ICMR‑NIRWoH), in collaboration with Professor Abhijit Majumder of the Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Bombay and Dr Anshul Bhide, obstetrician‑gynaecologist and maternal‑foetal medicine specialist. Together, the team engineered a “placenta‑on‑chip” that reproduces essential functions of the human placenta, including hormone secretion, nutrient transfer, selective barrier regulation and removal of waste products, using human placental and vascular cells cultured on either side of a porous membrane.
Explaining the clinical motivation for the work, Dr Anshul Bhide said the device can help answer critical questions about how medicines and other substances behave in pregnancy, including whether they cross the placental barrier and how they might affect the developing foetus. He noted that clinicians often have to make difficult decisions about drug use in high‑risk pregnancies with limited evidence, and that a platform like this can provide more reliable, human‑relevant data to guide safer treatment protocols.
Dr Deepak Modi emphasised that the team wanted a robust, scalable system that could be adopted widely by research laboratories, balancing engineering simplicity with biological relevance so that it fits into standard experimental workflows. He highlighted that the placenta‑on‑chip can also simulate disease‑like states, such as high blood sugar levels seen in gestational diabetes, allowing researchers to observe how such changes alter placental transport and barrier integrity. According to Dr Modi, this opens the door to using the platform not only for basic research, but also for screening candidate drugs and interventions for safety in pregnancy before clinical use.
Professor Abhijit Majumder underscored the broader significance of the work for organ‑on‑chip research in India, noting that the indigenous platform shows how engineering and medicine can come together to build tools tailored to local research needs. The team believes the placenta‑on‑chip can reduce dependence on animal models in reproductive research, accelerate the development of pregnancy‑safe therapies and ultimately contribute to better outcomes for mothers and babies by deepening scientific understanding of how the placenta works and fails in disease.
