‘Organ on a chip’ technology will help Rutgers, UPenn research medication safety during pregnancy

Is it safe to dye my hair during pregnancy? Are the ingredients in my shampoo harmful? What about the dietary supplement I take?

Lauren Aleksunes, a pharmacist and chemical safety researcher at Rutgers, didn’t have very good answers to some of her patients’ most pressing questions.

“We think it’s OK,” she’d tell them, “but we don’t know.”

Now the National Institutes of Health has awarded $5 million to create a new maternal health center at Rutgers that will study the safety of chemicals and ingredients in common products during pregnancy.

Called the Integrated Transporter Elucidation Center (InTEC), the effort will bring together researchers from Rutgers, University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions to research how chemicals and toxins pass through the placenta, and whether they can affect a fetus’ development.

This organ plays a critical role in providing oxygen and nutrients to a fetus, but little is known about how it responds to chemicals and other ingredients because most products cannot be ethically tested during pregnancy.

“Lots of us think, ‘Let’s just avoid all chemicals while pregnant,’” said Aleksunes, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers’ Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy.

But that’s not realistic, she said. For example, pregnant people need medication when they’re sick, or may not know they’re pregnant. Exposure to chemicals is unavoidable because they are in everything — medications, beauty products, living room furniture, and clothing.

In the past, doctors have relied on animal testing to assess product safety during pregnancy, but those findings often do not apply to people.

InTEC researchers will focus on developing better options. One approach they will use involves a novel technology developed by Penn engineers that seeks to mimic the biology of a human organ on a plastic chip.

Similar to the way engineers fit lots of data onto a tiny computer chip, researchers devised a way to grow human tissue on a piece of plastic the size of a pink school eraser.

Cells are placed in channels etched into the chip. Then the chip is placed in a solution similar to the wet environment that cells find inside the body. This encourages the cells to multiply and grow into live human tissue, said Dan Huh, an associate professor of bioengineering, who was part of the Penn team that developed the technique.

Since it was developed a decade ago, the technology has primarily been used in the pharmaceutical industry as an alternative to animal testing for new medications.

More recently, he partnered with Aleksunes to develop a “placenta on a chip” to study how the organ reacts to different medications and chemicals.

Dietary supplements, medications, and environmental toxins will be tested to see what can pass through the placenta to the fetus.

“It’s a gateway, and if this gateway is altered, it could have direct implications that are very, very important to know,” Huh said. “But it’s really challenging — if not impossible — to conduct those experiments on humans.”