Mariko Horii
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Preeclampsia affects up to one in ten pregnancies and is defined by new high blood pressure plus protein in the urine or organ damage after 20 weeks. Its symptoms disappear once the placenta is delivered, which points to the placenta itself as the source of the problem, yet the only definitive treatment remains delivery, sometimes dangerously early.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biology
Physiology
- Topics
preeclampsia
placenta
trophoblast
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Identify which stem cell-based culture method best reproduces the abnormal trophoblast differentiation seen in preeclamptic placentas, comparing approaches for modeling syncytiotrophoblast and extravillous trophoblast development.
- Characterize preeclampsia placentas showing maternal vascular malperfusion, with and without fetal vascular malperfusion, at the molecular level, and bank and profile umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem/stromal cells from each subtype.
- Evaluate signaling between trophoblasts and mesenchymal stem/stromal cells within the chorionic villi of preeclamptic placentas, testing whether this crosstalk differs between maternal vascular malperfusion subtypes.
- Establish subtype-specific cell-based models of preeclampsia that can serve as tools for identifying diagnostic biomarkers and candidate therapeutic targets.
More about the research
This project asks what is going wrong, cell by cell, in the placentas of women with early-onset preeclampsia, using laboratory-grown placental tissue built from stem cells.
Why it matters
Preeclampsia raises the risk of illness and death for both mother and baby, and the only definitive treatment, delivering the placenta, often means a medically necessary preterm birth. Cell-based models that capture distinct placental injury subtypes could support earlier diagnosis and treatments aimed at the specific defect, which may improve long-term health for mothers and infants.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Thorold Theunissen
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Genetics
Map the signaling cascade during early primed-to-naïve conversion of human pluripotent stem cells using quantitative phosphoproteomics, to find ways to activate naïve genes without causing instability.
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.
The school
University of California-San Diego: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 637 research doctorates a year.
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