The world’s first lab grown placenta has now survived for a full year remaining stable in its petri dish, which comes as good news to many in the medical field that have been held back due to lack of realistic models of human placenta.
Doctors at Cambridge University cultivated the miniaturized organoid by using placental cells which were donated by women who chose to terminate healthy pregnancies; once developed the placenta was confirmed to behave like the real thing using a Clear & Simple Digital Pregnancy Test.
The team have great aspirations for this placenta of fostering a new era of pregnancy research, especially pertaining to complications such as preeclampsia or fetal growth restriction which can both be caused by faulty placental development.
The fully functional organoid could serve as a more accurate model for medical research than that of previous attempts to recreate a placenta which include a lab on a chip version from 2015, as well as various placental cell cultures that did not reach the full scope of an organoid.
While it may be too soon to say whether or not this development will help researchers to achieve any of the aspirational medical breakthroughs in which they have high hopes for; but short of experimenting on the real thing this organoid is the next best thing and the most realistic model to date that clinical scientists have within their arsenal.
