Christiana Smith-Anderson
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Microbiology & Immunology
Babies can be harmed by inflammation in their mother during pregnancy even when they are never infected themselves. Such infants are at risk of altered brain development and poorly regulated immune responses.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
maternal-fetal interface
placenta
maternal inflammation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Profile gene expression in maternal and fetal cell types within placentas from pregnancies with HIV, with SARS-CoV-2 or with no infection, using single-cell spatial transcriptomics, which maps gene activity while keeping cells in place in the tissue.
- Compare inflammatory and regulatory biomarkers in maternal blood, infant blood, cord blood and placentas across the three groups, and link these levels to placental gene expression in the same participants.
- Characterize how inflammatory signals pass across the maternal-fetal interface using a new three-dimensional Transwell model that combines key human placental cell types.
More about the research
The team's preliminary data show that infants exposed to HIV but uninfected have high rates of illness and death, and that this risk rises with the level of maternal inflammation. Early reports suggest that acute COVID-19 in pregnancy may also affect fetal immune development. It is still unclear how inflammatory signals actually cross the placenta, the organ that links mother and fetus.
Why it matters
Identifying which placental cells and immune pathways carry maternal inflammation to the fetus could point to targets for future therapies that calm inflammation in pregnancy. Such therapies could help protect children born to mothers with HIV, COVID-19 or other inflammatory conditions from lasting effects on brain development and immune function.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Emily Adhikari
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Define types of placental tissue damage in pregnancies with syphilis and correlate them with Treponema pallidum burden and newborn outcomes, compared with gestational age–matched healthy controls.
Mana M Parast
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether villitis of unknown etiology (VUE) linked to fetal growth restriction has a distinct cellular profile of chronic immune responses and trophoblast or endothelial damage, using mass cytometry on banked placental tissue.
Adriana Weinberg
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Microbiology & Immunology
Define the immune defects of HIV-exposed uninfected infants by profiling function, phenotype, transcriptome and epigenome of natural killer and T cells at 6, 24 and 48 weeks of life, compared with HIV-unexposed infants.
The school
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus: 41 labs on PI Pages, $766M a year on research, 205 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus
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