A Placenta on a Chip: How Indian Scientists Are Decoding Mother-to-Baby Transfer

CURRENT AFFAIRS | 8 JULY 2026

For decades, one of the most important questions in medicine has also been one of the hardest to answer safely: when a pregnant woman takes a medicine, breathes polluted air, or catches an infection, exactly how much of it reaches the baby growing inside her? The organ that decides this — the placenta — sits at the very centre of pregnancy, yet remains one of the least understood organs in the human body. Now, a team of Indian scientists has built a tiny laboratory device that recreates the placenta on a transparent chip, opening a new and safer path to answering that question.

What Indian Researchers Have Built

A group of researchers has developed a lab-grown “placenta-on-chip” — an organ-on-chip platform that mimics the human placenta. The device allows scientists to study how drugs, nutrients, environmental pollutants and infectious agents pass from a mother’s body to her developing baby, all without any risk to an actual pregnancy.

The work was led by Anshul Bhide and Sourav Mukherjee under the supervision of Prof Deepak Modi at the ICMR–National Institute for Research in Reproductive and Child Health (ICMR-NIRRCH) in Mumbai, in collaboration with Prof Abhijit Majumder at IIT Bombay. It is a strong example of how a public health research institute and a premier technology institute can combine biology and engineering to solve a real clinical problem.

Why the Placenta Has Been So Hard to Study

The placenta is a remarkable organ. It acts as a protective barrier, shielding the foetus against many microbes and toxins. But it is not a perfect wall — many drugs still cross it and reach the foetus. Because of this uncertainty, doctors have long been forced to prescribe medicines during pregnancy with very little hard evidence about what is safe and what is not. Pregnant women are rarely included in drug trials for ethical reasons, which means the safety data simply does not exist for most medicines.

Until now, scientists studying the placenta had to rely on two imperfect options. The first was animal models, but animal placentas differ significantly from the human placenta, so results do not always translate. The second was static two-chamber laboratory systems, which are too simple to capture how a living placenta actually behaves. The new chip is designed to bridge exactly this gap.

What Makes This Platform Practical

One of the biggest strengths of the ICMR-NIRRCH and IIT Bombay device is its simplicity. It is static, simple, reproducible and usable in a standard laboratory — it does not need exotic equipment or complex pumping systems. That matters enormously for Indian research, because a tool that any well-equipped lab can build and repeat is a tool that can spread widely and be trusted. Reproducibility is the backbone of good science.

Why the Two Older Methods Fell Short

To appreciate why this chip matters, it helps to understand precisely why the earlier approaches failed pregnant patients. Animal models have been the workhorse of biomedical research for over a century, but the placenta is one of the most species-specific organs in mammals. The structure of the barrier, the number of cell layers separating maternal and foetal blood, and the way molecules are actively transported all differ sharply between, say, a mouse and a human. A drug that appears perfectly safe in a rodent’s placenta may still slip across the human placenta and harm a developing baby. History offers painful lessons here: several drugs once believed safe went on to cause devastating birth defects because animal data did not predict the human outcome.

The second option, static two-chamber laboratory systems, avoids the species problem by using human cells, but it is too crude to capture how a living placenta actually behaves. These simple dishes cannot recreate the intimate partnership between placental cells and blood-vessel cells, nor the dynamic, layered barrier that decides what passes and what is blocked. The new device threads the needle between these two extremes: it is built entirely from human cells, yet it is engineered to reproduce the placenta’s real architecture and function. That combination is what makes it genuinely useful for prediction rather than mere approximation.

How Scientists Know the Chip Really Works

A model is only trustworthy if it can be shown to behave like the real thing, and the team built in clear checkpoints to prove it. The production of beta-hCG is a powerful signal — this is the very hormone that pregnancy tests detect, and healthy placental tissue is its natural source. If the cells on the chip are secreting beta-hCG, they are doing the job of a real placenta rather than simply sitting inertly on a membrane. The chip’s ability to mimic glucose transport is equally important, because moving sugar from mother to baby in a controlled way is one of the placenta’s core daily tasks. Together, these two functional markers give researchers confidence that observations made on the chip will translate to real pregnancies.

What This Could Change for Mothers and Babies

The potential applications are wide. Because the chip lets researchers test how a substance crosses the placenta, it could accelerate the development of pregnancy-safe therapeutics — medicines that expectant mothers can take with confidence. It could also deepen our understanding of dangerous pregnancy conditions.

• Gestational diabetes: high blood sugar that develops during pregnancy, affecting both mother and baby.
• Foetal growth restriction: a condition where the baby does not grow to its expected size in the womb.
• Pre-eclampsia: high blood pressure during pregnancy that can damage organs and threaten the lives of both mother and child.

By studying how the placenta functions and fails, scientists hope to detect these conditions earlier and design better treatments.

A Model for Indian Innovation

Beyond its medical value, this achievement is a template for how Indian science can move forward — a national research council joining hands with an engineering institute to build something world-class using resources available at home. It reflects a growing confidence in India’s ability to produce frugal, reproducible technology that answers questions the whole world is asking.

The placenta-on-chip will not replace the wonder of a real pregnancy, but it may finally give doctors the evidence they have lacked for generations. For millions of mothers who worry about every pill they take, that is a quiet revolution — engineered, one tiny transparent chip at a time, in Indian laboratories.

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