Placenta on a chip: How one STAT reporter clearly described this complicated tech

As the 2023-2024 Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellow at STAT, AHCJ member Deborah Balthazar, a freelance journalist, covered several stories about biotechnology. One recent article delved into how researchers are studying the impacts of drugs and toxins on pregnancy using a tiny model of the placenta in the lab, known as placenta-on-a-chip.

It's worth a read not only for an update on what's happening in this fascinating area of investigation but also for Balthazar's expert descriptions of this microtechnology, likening it to the size of "a rubber eraser, etched with tiny channels through which fluids move."

Here, she tells AHCJ what inspired her story and offers advice for lively tech writing.

Responses have been edited for clarity brevity.

How did you get the idea for this story?

I had always been interested in organs on a chip, in general, and wanted to write a story about it. While I was at STAT, I saw a press release about a new award from the National Science Foundation to Dr. Nicole Hashemi of Iowa State University to continue her work on placenta-on-a-chip, where she was going to update her chip to do imaging and collect data in real-time. I thought, okay, this is interesting.

When I showed it to my editor, he agreed but suggested it would be good to move beyond the award and write an explainer, like, what is placenta-on-a-chip? How does it work? Why look into this research? Then it evolved, looking at how researchers study pregnant people when they are excluded from clinical trials. That's how it expanded from this really narrow topic to the story that came out.

How long did you spend reporting?

I started reporting this story in December 2023, and it was just on and off. I started it and I was like, alright, this is going to be simple. I just need to explain how placenta-on-a-chip works and what are the other applications of how this could be used.

I was also trying to figure out if this placenta on a chip could eventually replace animal testing. Or, how in a commercial sense if pharmaceutical companies had an interest in it. I went down so many rabbit holes. It took a while to figure out finally how to put all the information together to where it is now.

You very clearly described this technology. Do you have advice for writers new to biotech or who don't cover it regularly? How can they help explain these technologies in a simple way?

The advice that I got from my editor was just to come up with metaphors and other ways for people to understand clearly what exactly we are looking at. The thing that I spent the longest on was how to describe the chip. …. At first, we didn't have a great image of it.

Just describing how small the chip is, what does microfluidics mean, how does the fluid move from one side to the other, and why do we need the different layers - what does that do? You definitely don't need to dumb it down completely, but get it so that the reader then is able to say, "okay, yeah, I can totally see what this is and how can you put that organ on such a tiny device," and have that mental image throughout the story.

That was definitely something important that I felt that I needed to get down pat so that nobody would be lost. I could explain the rest of the information, but if you don't have that in mind, then probably the reader would just be kind of stuck on [what this is].

Another thing that I would suggest is to always listen for juicy details because it could make for a good lede, and it's a good way to humanize super-complicated research. I started the story with Dr. Hashemi trying to answer … how much caffeine she should drink while pregnant.

While she said it to me as an off-hand remark, it immediately got my attention, and I asked a bunch of follow-up questions because I knew that was how I wanted to start the story. It was an interesting anecdote, and I was sure that readers would also want to know the answer to that question. At the end of the story, I called back to the beginning and finally answered the question.

Trust the process. I was sure the pregnancy info sentences were going to be my bookends, but the end result was very different from where I started. There were so many iterations of how I wrote the story, and I'm really happy with how this came out.

What did you learn about these chip models?

When I was talking with different researchers, they wanted to impress the fact that there's only a handful of people who are studying, specifically, placenta-on-a-chip. There are only so many people who are doing research related to women's health, and this is really understudied.

And there's not really a lot of funding looking into this research. Researchers have been happy to see that more people have been involved or have decided to take up or do more research having to do with reproductive health.

What was important to you in telling the story?

I came to realize that it was a complicated kind of story. So, it was important to me to really make sure that I was able to tell this story in a way that was clear, so that other people would be able to understand what is the importance of this and what does it mean, especially for people who are unable to participate in clinical trials. How could this chip advance science so that you can have analogous data that could then be applied back to pregnant people to inform health care decisions?