Technology

Exosomes Provide New Window into Maternal-Fetal Microenvironment

Historically, it has been both ethically and physically difficult to study the maternal-fetal microenvironment due to safety concerns that prevent gaining access to gestational tissues via biopsy.
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Our published work demonstrates that the evolving field of circulating microparticle biology may offer a solution to these difficulties as these "exosome" particles present a real-time sampling of utero-placental and fetal-maternal crosstalk from an early time in pregnancy via maternal plasma.
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Our human clinical studies encompassing thousands of subjects from numerous independent patient cohorts indicate that our platform can reliably harvest and interrogate the contents of these particles to yield novel, blood-based, and clinically useful biomarker panels for detecting and managing a variety of pregnancy complications.

And since exosomes are shed abundantly from maternal and fetal tissues from an early time in pregnancy, our approach allows us to produce biosignatures as early as weeks 9-13 of pregnancy for conditions such as spontaneous preterm birth, preeclampsia, and placenta accreta.