Scientists Are Growing A Human Placenta On A Chip

In order to understand how the organ selectively transmits cells from mother to child

A placenta on a chip device

Courtesy of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

From lungs to brains, organ tissues grown on a lab are telling researchers a lot about how their cells do their jobs. Now researchers are using the technology to better understand the placenta, the temporary organ that connects a fetus and mother during pregnancy.

The placenta’s primary function is to act as a “crossing guard” between mother and child—it sends the good stuff (like nutrients and oxygen) along to the baby, while leaving other damaging elements like chemicals from environmental exposure or disease-causing bacteria or viruses. If the placenta is damaged or doesn’t work right, it could endanger the health of both the mother and the baby.

Researchers don’t really know how the placenta is able to transmit the good things while keeping out the bad. That’s because the placenta is notoriously difficult to study in humans—it takes a long time, varies a lot between individual patients, and could put the fetus’ safety at risk. In the past, most studies about the placenta were done in animals to work around these issues. Animal studies have shed some light on how the placenta works, but the tissue is never quite the same as in humans.

A rendering of the placenta on a chip

Scientists Are Growing A Human Placenta On A Chip

9:27 AM medical science, new technology, science

Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years

In an attempt to reverse evolution, the team has already made significant strides in mutating chickens back to the very creatures from which they descended. If that wasn’t enough genetic splicing and dicing, Harvard scientists attempted a similar feat recently by inserting the genes of a woolly mammoth into elephants in order to recreate the extinct beasts. Whoa baby.

If the four major differences between dinosaurs and birds are their tails, arms, hands and mouths, Horner and team have already flipped certain genetic switches in chicken embryos to reverse-engineer a bird’s beak into a dinosaur-like snout.

“Actually, the wings and hands are not as difficult,” Horner said, adding that a ‘Chickensoraus’ -- as he calls the creation -- is well on its way to becoming reality. “The tail is the biggest project. But on the other hand, we have been able to do some things recently that have given us hope that it won't take too long."

Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years

9:13 AM new technology, science

Detect Cancer 13 Years earlier

A new Diagnosis to Identify Cancer Risk Before 13 years

A recent study by scientists from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Harvard University shows how the shifting length of blood telomeres, which are the defensive covers at the end of DNA strands, may predict cancer development some 13 years prior to actual diagnosis.

The Role of Telomeres

A telomere is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of a chromatid, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighbouring chromosomes.

The scientists observed that blood telomeres—sequences of DNA at the end of a chromosome that protect them from deterioration—age quicker on future cancer patients compared to healthy individuals. This is indicated in the rapid length reduction of the telomeres, which then stop maturing for a couple of years in the period leading to the diagnosis of cancer.

"Understanding this pattern of telomere growth may mean it can be a predictive biomarker for cancer," said Dr. Lifang Hou, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine and the lead author of the study.

The distinguishing pattern exhibits a fast reduction in the blood telomeres' length, followed by three to four years of pause during which no significant changes in the length are recorded.

The scientists took various telomere measurements across a 13-year period in 792 persons. A total of 135 participants were eventually diagnosed with cancer, including leukemia, lung, skin and prostate cancer.

Telomeres reduce their length during cell division, and this process continues as humans age.


However, cancer cells also grow and divide very fast, so scientists once assumed these cells would also self-destruct since their telomeres would shorten. The study suggests that cancer cells have instead established a process to halt the reduction in the telomeres' length.

Hou said that if the process behind cancer cells escaping normal cell division and telomere reduction is examined more closely, then it is possible to develop treatments that can cause cancer cells to self-destruct without damaging healthy cells.

This study, published in the journal Ebiomedicine, hopes to analyze changes in telomere length in the years prior to the diagnosis of cancer and before the initiation of radiation treatment. It is known that treatments for cancer affect telomere length.

However, it should be noted that insurance companies warned that if cancer detection through this type of blood testing will be successful in forecasting cancer development, it could push up policy premiums for those people who are likely to develop the disease later on.

Detect Cancer 13 Years earlier

4:04 PM Cancer, cancer detection, featured, Medicine, science, telomere

Scientists develop prototype contact lenses that allow wearers to zoom in and out

Scientists are developing new contact lenses that could give wearers superhero-like vision.

The revolutionary lenses would allow individuals to zoom in and out, but which may also offer hope to thousands of elderly people suffering from vision loss.

The prototype lenses, presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s yesterday in San Jose, California, contain tiny aluminium telescopes that would interact with a pair of specially designed glasses to allow you to toggle between normal and ‘zoomed in’ viewing.

The operating instructions tell users to wink the right eye to zoom and the left to zoom out.

 The prototype lenses

The lenses, which were first developed with the US Defence Advance Research Projects Agency as super-thin cameras for aerial drones, have been retooled as a possible solution for those with age-related macular degeneration.

Macular degeneration is when the light receptors on the inner surface of the eye are lost, resulting in blurred central vision. This can make performing normal talks – such as reading – next to impossible.

Eric Tremblay, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, said: “We think these lenses hold a lot of promise for low vision and age-related macular degeneration.

“At this point, it is still research but we are very hopeful it will eventually become a real option for people with age-related macular degeneration,”

However, before the lenses can be rolled out scientists need to create a lighter, more ‘breathable’, version.

The rigid prototypes, which still allow light through the centre of the lenses, are bigger and thicker than traditional lenses but surrounded by mirrors.

It is these mirrors that provide the ‘superhero’ elements of the contact lenses. By bouncing the light around the view – as seen by the wearer – is magnified.

The spectacles would control the level of magnification.  

Scientists develop prototype contact lenses that allow wearers to zoom in and out

3:15 PM contact lenses, lense, new technology, science