Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Have you been surprised by what we do and don't know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what's happening (or has happened) to our bodies--both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth.
After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women's health in this transition.
Every Tuesday you'll hear:
- Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don't work
- Information you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy
- .A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what's happening inside your body
- Listen to hear what you won't find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Can Gene Therapy fix the placenta? New hope for fetal growth restriction: Conversation with Dr. Helen Jones, Part I
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If you're listening to this episode on placental gene therapy, you may wanna sit down.
Today's guest walks us through a gene therapy that (a) doesn't change the chromosomal DNA of the mother or the fetus; that (b) can reverse (you heard that right)--REVERSE placental insufficiency after it has taken hold, and as if that weren't enough, (c) has successfully restored fetal weight in growth, restricted Guinea pigs, passed safety checks in macaques and maybe in clinics as soon as five years from now.
To look at Dr. Helen Jones' work, see: https://physiology.med.ufl.edu/profile/jones-helen/
The paper we use as a scaffold for our conversation today: Placental Gene Therapy in Nonhuman primates: a pilot study of maternal, placental and fetal response to non-viral, polymeric nanoparticle delivery of IGF1: https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/30/11/gaae038/7876288?login=false