The placenta may be the most important organ in a body – it gives life to us all – and yet it is probably the least-studied organ.

The placenta is the gatekeeper for a foetus, allowing a mother’s nutrients to pass in one direction while waste passes back into the mother’s bloodstream. It produces hormones to encourage foetal growth and offers protection against most bacteria, although not against viruses.

But, when the placenta fails to function normally, it can put the health and life of both foetus and mother at serious risk, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. Among the biggest such problems is pre-eclampsia, which kills half a million babies and around 76,000 mothers every year globally.

The condition affects up to 5 per cent of all pregnancies – Kim Kardashian recently suffered both pre-eclampsia and placenta accreta, another dangerous condition in which the placenta grows too deeply into the wall of the uterus.

Even when babies survive pre-eclampsia, they can suffer from growth restriction or other health problems, including brain and heart defects, and diabetes, later in life. Growth restriction is the most common factor in still-births, when there are insufficient placental blood vessels to keep the foetus nourished.

And how do we treat this killer condition? The tools we have are no more advanced than aspirin, and premature deliveries.

Aspirin is our frontline tool but is effective only if taken early in pregnancy. Other drugs combat symptoms, such as lowering blood pressure.

Ultimately, our only prevention is to induce premature delivery.

Research into the placenta is desperately needed, which is why my team at Aston Medical School is developing a radical new way of carrying out tests on the organ.

The Aston University team will collaborate with engineers from a Dutch company, Mimetas, developing a method of growing human placentas on a ‘chip’ – we call it iPlacenta. The placentas are grown from cells harvested from umbilical cords, and so treatments can be tested without any risk to either mothers or foetuses.

These chips, which are about the size of a mobile phone, will hold up to 48 miniature placentas, each one of which can be an individual experiment. The chips can be slotted into existing equipment to make analysis both relatively easy and inexpensive.

The tiny placentas can also mimic the organ’s diseased state, hopefully allowing us an insight into how pre-eclampsia develops, so the condition can ultimately be identified and treated early.

This new research may be groundbreaking – even growing a single placenta would be an achievement – but it’s only one of three approaches we are taking at Aston. We’re also working on ultrasound techniques, with Samsung and FUJIFILM VisualSonics, to better understand the placenta and help us identify those most at risk.

And we’re also teaming up with mathematicians at the University of Rostock in Germany to build a huge computer model to help us understand pre-eclampsia. Ultimately, our ambition is to be able to use this model to predict outcomes for individual patients, and to help us build experiments for our iPlacenta chips.

The Aston research I coordinate is backed by €4million funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and will involve experts in ten different centres feeding information into our programme. We are based at the UK’s newest medical school, at Aston University, which is headed up by Professor Asif Ahmed, a worldwide authority on pre-eclampsia.

Our research is really only just beginning and, as well as bringing health benefits, we hope that eventually our work will save the health service money – a lot of money.

It has been estimated that premature births cost the NHS almost £1billion a year, and that delaying premature births by just one week could save the NHS £260million a year – that’s because premature babies tend to need the highest levels of care.

But, as important as the financial costs are, it’s the human costs that are most significant. Kim Kardashian has been candid about the suffering pre-eclampsia and placenta accreta caused her, and she has access to the finest medical teams.

Tens of millions of other mothers around the world are not so lucky, which is why we need to be able to identify these conditions and treat them long before they become life-threatening and require major medical intervention.

This is, literally, a matter of life and death – for both mothers, and for babies who have barely started their lives.

It’s a familiar sight – the uniformed security guard patrolling the store on the lookout for shoplifters, ready to spring into action to stop thieves from getting away with the goods. Retailers have long known the value of proactive security to prevent loss and act as a deterrent in the real world. However, it seems that in the virtual world the retail security guard is out of shape, unable to keep up with the almost continuous threat of cyberattack. In a recent A10 Networks global survey 29% of participants felt that the retail sector is the least prepared to respond to cyberattacks. This was far higher than sectors such as finance and government. Why is retail so vulnerable and what are the challenges to overcome so that customers can shop in safety?

Sale of the century for cybercriminals

The retail sector is a seductive target for cybercriminals. High transaction volumes, including spikes at predictable times such as the holiday season and Black Friday, offer plenty of opportunities for fraudsters to get in amongst legitimate purchasers and make a profit. Beyond direct fraud, the vast quantity of customer data collected by retailers is of immense value to cybercriminals, who offer it for sale on the deep and dark web. The sector is also a target for hacktivists looking for notoriety; bringing down a major retailer’s site with a DDoS attack over the holiday season will certainly make you famous.

Attacks on the retail sector are on the rise. PWC recently found that attacks globally were up by 30% year on year and the number of serious data breaches in retail firms reported to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has doubled. In a climate where customers are increasingly aware of the importance of privacy and the risks of identity theft, this statistic is a big problem for retailers. A report by MediaPro found that 84 percent of shoppers would change their shopping habits if a retailer experienced a cyberattack, with 49 percent saying that they would be unlikely to buy from that retailer in future. In the fast-paced world of online retail, this reputational damage can cost millions. On top of this, the implementation of the GDPR in 2018 is going to make the financial consequences of data losses far heavier, with organisations facing fines of up to 4% of annual turnover should their management of customer data be found to be in breach.

Key challenges for retail

Retailers have an enormous incentive to gather customer data to drive sales and marketing programmes. They are less heavily regulated than sectors such as finance or government so the drive to put data security first is not so strong. However, as they respond to competitive pressure to develop multichannel shopping experiences and offer customer-enticing loyalty schemes, so they also create more potential points of attack and opportunities for cybercriminals to take advantage. Evidence suggests that security systems are not evolving alongside retail innovations, with only 58% of retailers reporting that they have an overall security strategy in place. This needs to improve if the sector is to protect itself from cyberattacks of increasing frequency and sophistication. As they take advantage of the efficiencies and scalability of cloud and other technologies, retailers need to be confident that their systems can detect and neutralise malicious activity and protect customer data as it is transferred around the organisation.

Another challenge lies in the fact that retail is staff-intensive. People can be security’s best asset or its biggest weakness, but in the UK government’s 2017 cyber security breaches survey, only 33% of retail executives believed that core staff took security seriously. This figure compared with 63% in the finance industry – perhaps an indication of the stringent regulations governing that sector. Staff turnover in retail is generally higher than in other industries, so it can be a challenge to keep on top of educating staff about their security responsibilities, but it’s not something that can be shirked as the consequences of poor practices can be severe.

Retail is an important part of everyday life and customers value ease of use and convenience very highly. But they also value their private information. If retailers are going to continue to be trusted by their customers, they need to get their security guards up to scratch in the virtual world as well as in the real one.