Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Have you been surprised by what we do and don't know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what's happening (or has happened) to our bodies--both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth.
After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women's health in this transition.
Every Tuesday you'll hear:
- Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don't work
- Information you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy
- .A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what's happening inside your body
- Listen to hear what you won't find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
A 3-D model of a placenta (on-a-chip): Conversation with Dr. Colin Murdoch
The human placenta is a superhero of organs. It's a master regulator of hormones, a negotiator with the maternal immune system, and capable of adapting structurally and metabolically--in real time--to changes in it's environment to cater to the fetus. But it also has a lot of black box features, in part because it is a difficult organ to study.
My guest today talks about an amazing paradigm shift in the way we can examine the placenta, using organ on a chip technology that frees us from the petri dish, and takes advantage of organ on a chip technology to create a 3-D proto placenta that responds to mechanical pressure and allows for investigation of the interaction between multiple cell types grown from induced human pluripotent stem cells. This kind of model will allow us to ask lots of important questions about how the placenta interacts with different drugs and maybe too what factors influence how the developing placenta invades the mother's body, providing more clues about preeclampsia, among other things.
You can find more about Dr. Colin Murdoch's work here: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/people/colin-murdoch