Placenta donation

Closeness to childbirth we recommend mothers’ future placenta donation since it can help Eugenia Menni Research Centre’s progress and field research.

The Eugenia Menni Research Centre has been working for years in the research with stem cells and it has focused on the following fields of research:

• Human placenta’s fetal membranes’ cells: isolation, phenotypical characterisation and potential differentiation.
• Immunomodulating properties of the fetal membranes’ cells.
• Pre-clinical development for the transplant of placenta’s stem cells.

The CREM is historically engaged in the research on the placenta, an organ which plays a crucial role in pregnancy since it supplies the baby with adequate nutrition, allows the transfer of oxygen and protects the baby from infections. After the childbirth it is no more needed and consequently thrown away, but it is important to highlight how safe and non-invasive it is to retrieve the available cells:

1. Placental tissues, originating in the early stages of embryonic development, may contain cells with a still  immature phenotype, a plasticity and a certain degree of staminality that are typical of embryonic cells;
2. Considering the essential role of the placenta in keeping maternal-fetal tolerance (that is, that delicate, so fascinating but still little known, immunological balance, which comes to be created between the mother and the fetus and which allows the maternal immune system to tolerate a genetically different fetal-placental unit,   thus avoiding rejection), placenta cells may have immunomodulatory properties that are considered useful  in transplantation situations between different individuals (transplantation), but also in cases  where an immunomodulatory action may have a therapeutic effect (eg diseases involving inflammatory and fibrotic processes). Finally, as the placenta after the childbirth has no longer any function and is thrown away, the recovery of cells from this organ is not invasive for the donor and the use of cells does not evoke any ethical problem.