HSE and NMIC AGP named after V.I. Kulakova: Placenta-on-chip

The main articles are:

• Organs on a chip
• Pregnancy and childbirth

2025: Placenta-on-a-Chip Performance

Biologists from the Higher School of Economics together with researchers from the National Medical Research Center of the AGP named after V.I. Kulakov use microfluidic technologies to study pre-eclampsia. This dangerous complication affects about 8% of all pregnancies in the world. Preeclampsia begins to manifest itself only in late pregnancy - most often with high blood pressure, protein in the urine and impaired organ function. Despite decades of research, the exact causes of the disease remain not fully studied, but scientists believe that the origins should be sought at the stage of placental formation. The HSE announced this on August 18, 2025.

When pregnancy begins, the embryo is implanted into the wall of the uterus, and the placenta forms. In order for the child to eat stably, regardless of the mother's well-being, the vessels must always remain about one lumen and give a stable blood flow. To do this, special cells that make up part of the embryo - trophoblast - penetrate the thickness of the wall of the uterus and find these vessels.

Formally, this is very similar to tumor invasion. Special cells of the embryo, like metastases, penetrate the tissues of the uterus and cover the vessels from the inside. Because these cells are of a different origin than vascular cells, they do not respond to changes occurring to the mom. If for some reason this does not happen to the end, the vessels begin to respond to various signals, changing their lumen, and the placenta releases substances that negatively affect the condition of the mother and fetus, "said Yevgeny Knyazev, first author of the study, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Physiology, Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, HSE.

Despite many years of research, there is no universal method of treating preeclampsia, and the therapy is aimed mainly at managing symptoms - reducing blood pressure, maintaining organ function. One of the main obstacles in the development of therapy is the difficulty of studying the pathogenesis, that is, the mechanism of development of the disease: the placenta is a unique and temporary organ, and experiments on pregnant women are impossible for ethical reasons. Animal models, in particular rodents, which turned out to be closest to humans, do not reproduce key features of human placentation. Therefore, researchers turn to cellular models.

Of particular value are models that allow you to imitate the key characteristics of preeclampsia - insufficient trophoblast invasion, vascular dysfunction, - said Evgeny Knyazev. - This allows us not only to observe the pathological process, but also to look for ways to correct it.

In the first phase of the study of preeclampsia, it is necessary to create a model for assessing permeability, which is important, for example, for the selection of drugs. This makes it possible to understand whether they can be used in pregnancy. The second stage is the creation of a model with human cells to assess the development of the disease and individual risks. This is particularly important for women at high risk of complications, including IVF or burdened heredity. Such approaches will open the way to screening potential drugs, predicting the course of pregnancy and individualized intervention strategies.

The authors emphasize that modeling preeclampsia, as well as other diseases, is not just an academic task. It is an important element of translational medicine that seeks to transfer knowledge from the laboratory to the clinic as quickly as possible. In the future, chip technologies could be combined with big data analysis, AI and automated drug testing platforms.