Rupa Radhakrishnan
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Opioid use disorder (OUD) during pregnancy has risen sharply, and an American baby is born with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) every 15 minutes. NOWS is withdrawal in a newborn after exposure to opioids in the womb.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
opioid use disorder
neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome
neonatal abstinence syndrome
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Determine how prenatal opioid exposure affects the developing fetal brain over time, using repeated structural and functional fetal brain MRI in pregnancies of mothers with opioid use disorder.
- Assess how opioids change the size, shape and function of the placenta by combining placental imaging with epigenetics, proteomics and opioid pharmacogenetics, the gene variants that govern opioid uptake, transport and metabolism.
- Correlate impaired fetal brain development and placental dysfunction with the severity of neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome and with infant neurodevelopmental outcomes such as Bayley Scales scores.
- Identify blood proteomic and placental epigenetic biomarkers that, together with imaging, predict NOWS severity and poor infant neurodevelopment.
More about the research
Mothers with OUD face higher risks of pregnancy complications. Their babies risk withdrawal and long-term problems with learning and behavior. Doctors currently have no objective tools to predict these risks early. This project asks how prenatal opioid exposure (POE) changes the developing fetal brain, and how the health of the placenta, the organ that nourishes the fetus, shapes those changes.
Why it matters
Early, objective markers from fetal and placental imaging, genetics and blood tests could help clinicians identify which pregnancies affected by opioid use disorder are at highest risk. These include risk of placental dysfunction, severe newborn withdrawal and poor child development. The long-term goal is safer and more effective OUD treatment during pregnancy, along with fewer NOWS cases, better child neurodevelopment and less maternal relapse.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brady Atwood
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Test whether oxycodone increases tau protein expression, phosphorylation and oligomerization (clumping) in the mouse prefrontal cortex, and whether these changes cause synaptic dysfunction.
Susanne Brummelte
Wayne State University, MI·Neuroscience
Compare how buprenorphine and morphine, given to female rats from before conception through early postpartum, alter the endogenous opioid system and neurochemistry of the maternal brain network.
Helen Kamens
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether baseline resting-state functional connectivity, measured by rsfMRI in awake male and female C57BL/6J mice, predicts how much morphine each mouse later drinks voluntarily.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.