Here is the link to the article.
We don’t think about placenta very much (just gets discarded, so who cares!). But in the last few years, we have found it to be such a fascinating field — a wild west for finding new mechanisms. What many people don’t know is that in humans, the placenta invades deeply into the mother’s endometrium. And the placenta is a fetal organ — so this maternal-fetal interface (MFI) is really a frontier where tissues of two different genetic origins interact!
This is a very unique situation unlike anything in the human body. For those who has followed us, we have been drawing parallels to MFI to cancer (which are your own cells transformed) and the non-cancer cells of your body. Here is another paper showing how the placental cells reverse the mother’s defenses and let themselves be invaded by the fetal cells.
Specifically, the maternal cells lay down a lot of matrix, but the wily placental cells signal to them to reverse these defenses.
Congratulations to all the authors: Here is the article.
A big achievement!