Improving prenatal care through liquid biopsies
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and preterm birth pose huge risks to fetal and maternal long-term health and a large financial burden. They also disproportionately affect people of color who frequently interact with a healthcare system that turns away from and ignores them. Adding to this stark reality, we cannot predict either condition early enough to allow for meaningful clinical intervention. To monitor prenatal health and diagnose pregnancy complications, we have developed 3 liquid biopsy tests that measure cell-free RNA (cfRNA) to predict how far along a pregnancy is and whether a mother is at risk of preeclampsia and preterm delivery long before traditional diagnostics. This work paves the way for affordable, simple, and reliable tests for preeclampsia and preterm delivery -- risks that no other test can presently diagnose early enough to allow for meaningful clinical intervention. We further demonstrate that cfRNA changes reflect the multifactorial nature of preeclampsia and provide a means to non-invasively monitor maternal organ health. To enable such discoveries, we have also built a low-cost, semi-automated pipeline to process samples, a notoriously tedious task, which to date, has extracted cfRNA from nearly 1100 samples in 9 days. This pipeline is generalizable for many nucleic acid extraction applications, thereby helping to democratize large-scale discovery stage work and presenting a means for smaller labs to process large sample sets with higher technical reproducibility. Altogether, we have built tools to understand pregnancy and its complications, and shown that cfRNA molecules present in blood plasma are a rich data source with the potential to change the standard of care and empower mothers to more strongly advocate for themselves during pregnancy.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Moufarrej, Mira Noura |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Quake, Stephen Ronald |
| Thesis advisor | Quake, Stephen Ronald |
| Thesis advisor | Nuyujukian, Paul Herag |
| Thesis advisor | Stevenson, David A |
| Degree committee member | Nuyujukian, Paul Herag |
| Degree committee member | Stevenson, David A |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Bioengineering |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Mira Noura Moufarrej. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Bioengineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/zs793bw9095 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Mira Noura Moufarrej
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-SA).
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