Placenta you and every person ever born for 9 months supported, for your lungs and kidneys and hormones while pumping you developed in the womb. Problems with this fabric disk-shaped mass can contribute to everything from premature births to diseases of middle age. But when a baby is born, hospitals usually throw away the placenta.
"It is the least understood human body," explains Alan Guttmacher, director of the National Child Health and Human Development Institute (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. "Much of the scientific community never think the placenta at all. "He and others hope to change that, however, by researchers and rallying donors, including other parts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), around a effort to better understand the organ underestimated. At a workshop of NICHD-sponsored last week, some 70 researchers prepared their ideas for what NICHD called human placenta Project, including ways to better monitor the placenta during pregnancy, and medications to strengthen when it moved.
forms of human placenta primarily from cells that develop from the outer layer of fetal cells that surround an early embryo. In early pregnancy, these trophoblasts invade the uterine wall and later develop a complex network of tiny projections called villi, which contain fetal blood vessels. This tree structure of the villi absorbs oxygen and nutrients from the maternal blood; waste from the fetus and carbon dioxide in the interval broadcast in maternal blood. Other specialized cells connect the placenta that develops on the umbilical cord. To avoid rejection by the immune system of the mother, the placenta uses various tricks, like not the expression of certain proteins. The role of the placenta during pregnancy is "an incredibly interesting biological time" that offers lessons for everything from cancer to organ transplantation, says physician-researcher Kimberly Leslie University of Iowa in Iowa City.
a malfunction, too small, or low placenta attached can kill the fetus of hunger, its growth stunted, and can also contribute to preeclampsia, or pregnancy-related high blood pressure, a condition that occurs in up to 6% of pregnancies and may necessitate premature delivery of a baby. adult diseases, too, from cardiovascular disease with insulin resistance, appear to be related to the morphology of the abnormal placenta poorly understood reasons.
during the recent strategic planning at the NICHD, the researchers concluded that the placenta deserved further study. "He came several times," said Guttmacher. He hopes that the Human Placenta project will focus on the understanding of both normal and abnormal placenta in real time during pregnancy. It will also look at possible interventions for example, a drug that stimulates the growth of an abnormally small placenta.
Some of the workshop hope adapt ultrasound and magnetic imaging resonance techniques now used to study the heart and brain to measure blood flow and oxygenation in the placenta. Inject tracers, however, can be a sensitive ethical territory. "People are very afraid to do things for pregnant women," said researcher placenta Nicholas Illsley, Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, at the meeting. Another idea is to search the bloodstream of the mother for cells and nucleic acids made by the placenta as a window into the function of the organ.
the researchers also thought to create a "placenta on a chip" that mimic the tissue in the laboratory or the development of molecular sensors that could monitor the placenta during pregnancy. "It sounds like science fiction, but if you show me an iPhone it 20 years ago, I would have said this was science fiction," said Yoel Sadovsky, of the Research Institute Magee- Women in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the meeting.
participants described some immediate objectives. one is to come up with standard definitions of normal and abnormal placenta. placenta morphology varies greatly, and those of a healthy pregnancy can still have visible defects, while those sick babies often look completely normal, says Brian Cox systems biologist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Even before the NICHD meeting, the international community the placenta researchers had begun to coordinate their efforts by planning a site that list biobanks placenta and help match existing employees.
when the budget NICHD is flat, the money could be a limiting factor for human Placenta project, Guttmacher hopes will fund its first grants in 2016 and go for a decade or more. It provides that, in addition to set aside new money for the project, NICHD can give extra weight to high-quality grant applications focused on the placenta. NICHD's own contribution can only be "in the millions" of dollars, said Guttmacher. But he said that eight other NIH institutes have expressed interest in contributing, as the March of Dimes, an organization long focused on maternal and child health. After a long, a disposable body may get the attention it deserves
* Clarification, June 3, 2:25 p.m. :. An earlier version of this item incorrectly reported that NICHD do not expect to set aside funding Human Placenta project.
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