With the help of CGI models of placentas, universities are collaborating to investigate why one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage
For an engineer, Dr Michelle Oyen has spent a lot of time with placentas recently. “It’s a really weird organ, half baby, half mother. It must begin functioning at the same time as it develops. There’s nothing else like it in the body,” she says.
Oyen is committed to discovering why pregnancies go wrong. And fascinated by applying engineering principles to medical research in her post as reader in bioengineering at the University of Cambridge. “You can’t experiment on pregnant women – it’s totally unethical and impossible.” Instead, her team take high-resolution images of donated placentas to understand the geometry of blood vessels. They then use these to build 3D online models to understand how blood flows around the placenta. “We are trying to understand how cells involved in building a placenta know how to invade the right amount into a uterus,” she says. “They have to get it just right, and it’s a poorly understood process.”
Related: Scientists identify cause of multiple miscarriages for first time
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