Dr. Tasneem Ali Obaisi is a board-certified pediatrician based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, with a strong focus on neonatology and pediatric emergency medicine. She trained within the Jordanian Royal Medical Services, gaining extensive experience across both tertiary and rural healthcare settings. Currently working at Al Jalila Children’s Hospital in Dubai, she specializes in the stabilization and management of critically ill infants and children, including neonatal intensive care and resuscitation. Dr. Obaisi achieved top rankings in both the Jordanian and Arab Boards of Pediatrics and earned her MBBS from Dubai Medical University. Alongside her clinical work, she is actively involved in research, with publications and multiple pediatric case reports, and participates in quality improvement initiatives. She remains committed to advancing pediatric care through continuous professional development and academic engagement.

Artificial Placenta and Partial Ectogenesis for Extremely Preterm Infants: A Narrative Review Abstract: Extremely preterm births on the edge of viability still have high death rates and many long-term health problems. Most of this is due to the sudden and involuntary shift from fetal placental support to neonatal lung breathing. Between 22–24 weeks of gestation, a fetus’s lungs, brain, and metabolic control systems are not biologically ready for life outside the womb. They are thus more vulnerable to ventilator-induced lung injury, oxygen toxicity, hemodynamic instability, and inflammatory cascades that lead to bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). However, modern neonatal intensive care can provide ventilation and oxygenation. Artificial placenta (AP) and artificial womb (AW) technologies, often called partial ectogenesis, aim to offer extracorporeal gas exchange—ideally via umbilical vessels—while maintaining fluid-filled lungs within a closed, thermoregulated amniotic environment to support fetal physiology after birth.  Ovine models of pumpless arteriovenous circuits and sealed fluid environments have been successfully used to develop fetuses with a developmental age similar to periviable human fetuses for several days or weeks, while maintaining stable patterns of fetal circulation . However, near-impossible challenges—including reliable umbilical vascular access, ultra-low-resistance performance of oxygenators at fetal flows and pressures, hemocompatibility and anticoagulation issues, infection control for extended-duration fluid systems, and a complete inability to replicate the placental endocrine and metabolic functions essential for normal growth and organ development —prevent translation from “physiological proof-of-concept” to safe clinical use in humans. The ethical implications are considerable as well; partial ectogenesis may shift how societies and clinician's approach viability, impact resuscitation thresholds and periviability counseling, increase the stakes of consent in high-stress emergent environments, and create distributive justice dilemmas if access is limited to highly resourced centers. This narrative review will discuss the ethical landscape that incentivizes responsible research and could lead to clinical adoption, summarize the most prominent received preclinical evidence, describe principal translational challenges, and contextualize the physiologic rationale.