Placental Development
Research Leader: Associate Professor Claire Roberts
Clinical Leader: Professor Gus Dekker
The Placental Development group aims to identify pre-pregnancy and/or early gestation markers that have the ability to predict a couple's risk for the development of adverse pregnancy outcomes.
The group has identified factors that promote placental development and function and maternal adaptation to pregnancy that interact in determining pregnancy success. The group is part of the international SCOPE consortium, which is a multicentre trial that has currently recruited about 7000 couples around the world.
In Adelaide we recruited 1380 women to SCOPE, the last of whom delivered their babies in March 2009. In addition, the group has another smaller Adelaide-based clinical study: PAPO, Predicting Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes.
Research Priorities:
- Identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that can be used to predict pregnancy outcome
- Combine SNPs and develop a clinical test to identify couples at risk for pregnancy complications long before symptoms arise. This will enable appropriate antenatal care in both high risk and low risk settings
- Perform cell culture work and elucidate the role of the particular genes of interested in trophoblast proliferation and function in order to understand their role in placentation
- Identify circulating micronutrient factors, thrombophilias, hormones and lipids associated with adverse pregnancy outcome
- Determine if DNA damage in sperm is correlated with DNA damage in peripheral lymphocytes
- Determine if B-vitamins and SNPs are associated with DNA damage in either sperm or peripheral lymphocytes
- Determine if DNA damage in mothers and fathers is associated with adverse pregnancy outcome
- Determine that the polymorphisms we have identified have functional effects on gene expression in the placenta
- Provide further proof-of-concept that our new embryo media formulation improves implantation rate, placental development and has no adverse effects on postnatal growth trajectory and reproductive potential of offspring
