Rashmi Sood
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Physiology
Placental abruption is one of the most dangerous things that can happen in pregnancy: the placenta tears away from the uterine wall before the baby is born, cutting off the fetus's blood supply and putting the mother at risk of severe bleeding. It complicates 1–2% of births, and two-thirds of cases are severe.
- Fields
Physiology
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
placental abruption
pregnancy complications
decidua
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Identify and phenotype the immune cell populations that change in the decidua, the uterine lining that meets the placenta, and track their trafficking into and out of the tissue as clots form and abruption develops in EPCR-deficient mice.
- Dissect which blood coagulation components and which contributions of the vascular endothelium drive the onset of decidual clots versus their progression to placental abruption.
- Test whether neutrophils and their enzyme myeloperoxidase, which generates toxic oxidants, drive placental injury through a self-reinforcing cycle of oxidative stress and chronic inflammation.
- Determine whether thrombin receptor Par4 signaling is required for clots in the decidua to progress into abruption, and relate the mouse findings to histone citrullination and myeloperoxidase release seen in human placental abruption.
More about the research
Because human placental tissue cannot be collected until after delivery, almost nothing is known about how the damage starts or how it builds. This work asks how blood clotting and inflammation feed each other in the uterine lining to produce abruption.
Why it matters
Placental abruption can kill the mother or fetus and leaves surviving babies at risk of growth restriction, low birth weight, stillbirth and preterm delivery. Identifying the specific clotting and inflammatory steps that convert a small decidual clot into abruption could point toward ways to detect the process early or block it with drugs, and the mechanisms may extend to other placental complications of pregnancy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lauren Richardson
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Adapt a multi-organ feto-maternal interface chip with a temperature-controlled flow system that perfuses 39°C medium on the maternal side, mimicking heat carried by maternal blood.
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.
Cande Ananth
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build a linked birth database of about 16 million births in five U.S. states from 2000–2016, assigning each residence daily PM2.5 and its components, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and weather measures.
The school
Medical College of Wisconsin: 17 labs on PI Pages, $360M a year on research, 44 research doctorates a year.
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