Pregnancy complications including preeclampsia, fetal growth restriction, and preterm birth can have devastating short- and long-term impacts on the mother and child. Though affecting up to 20% of all pregnancies, these conditions are not completely understood, and there is a serious lack of therapies to effectively prevent or treat disease. Our team has developed novel preclinical screening approaches, utilising primary human tissue models and mouse models of disease to test innovative therapeutic strategies, which include examining new drugs and innovative delivery methods.
Vital to the design of our pipeline studies is our access to healthy and pathological human tissues collected from across gestation. These prized human tissues have allowed us to produce our own specialised models of pregnancy and disease, closely simulating human pregnancy in the laboratory. This includes outgrowth models using first trimester placental tissues, which allow us to study how the placenta responds to a therapy in a key window of early placental development. We have also developed vascular models of preeclampsia to simulate the vascular dysfunction characteristics of the disease within the maternal systemic vasculature. These models utilise maternal serum collected from pregnancies complicated by preeclampsia to induce vasoconstriction of human arteries, collected from pregnant patients, allowing us the ability to test whether we can reverse this feature of preeclampsia with candidate therapies.
Pregnant individuals are systematically and repeatedly excluded from clinical trials for new therapies due to fear of harm to the growing fetus. We are expanding our pipeline to not only assess candidate therapies for pregnancy complications, but to also produce robust preclinical data to demonstrate the safety/effectiveness of therapies for other underlying conditions one might have in pregnancy. These findings would guide clinicians and encourage industry to include pregnant cohorts in their clinical trials - improving equity of access to therapies in pregnancy.