PFI (MCA): Modeling the Transport of Pharmaceutical Agents Across the Placental Barrier

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation – Mid Career Advancement (PFI-MCA) project lies in an innovative approach and platform technology – integrating 3D cell culture, sensing, and imaging. This system will further enable understanding of physiological processes and can be personalized for each expecting mother using their stem cells, leading to higher accuracy in testing for the transport rate of specific compounds and setting safe exposure levels. The successful completion of this project will lead to an economical and physiologically relevant tool that accommodates testing of a larger number of compounds, facilitates high-throughput screening and rapid data collection, and thus ensures market potential for this technology. The proposed project presents a paradigm shift from the approach currently used to study the transport of pharmaceutical drugs through the placental barrier and their effects on the developing placenta. This platform will replicate the physiological matrix mechanics, hemodynamics, and compound’s ability to permeate through the placental barrier, which will enable quantitative studies to be performed on a vast range of pharmaceuticals to understand their interactions, including transport through the vasculature, and translocation across the placental barrier to diffuse into the fetal blood stream. Furthermore, the system can ultimately be personalized for each expecting mother using their stem cells. This could lead to higher accuracy in testing the transport rate of certain compounds while reducing the cost and enabling real-time monitoring and rapid data collection. Collectively, the proposed technology enables the understanding of critical metabolic and inflammatory processes in the placenta, laying the foundation for its potential commercialization in the future. This project is jointly funded by the Partnerships for Innovation program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.