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Specialists from the University Hospitals of Bordeaux, Poitiers and Limoges initiated the “In Utero Care” research project. The goal: to offer new therapeutic options to women to prevent miscarriages and fetal deaths.
One in ten women will suffer a miscarriage in her lifetime. A phenomenon that is still too little understood – and largely minimized – that several experts from several university hospitals in the South-West have decided to take head on. A project called “In utero care” aims to better identify and treat pathologies of pregnancy to prevent repeated miscarriages and fetal deaths in utero.
A rare inflammatory pathology of the placenta involved
The “In Utero Care” project was born out of a collaboration between hospital-university teams (Gynecology-obstetrics, Internal medicine and Immunology) from the Bordeaux University Hospital and the University of Bordeaux. All the teams are thus mobilized to research and identify the causes of repeated miscarriages, fetal deaths in utero and intrauterine growth retardation.
According to their first observations, the immunity of certain women would be in question. Intervillitis, a rare inflammatory disease of the placenta would also be singled out. Of undetermined origin, it causes inflammatory placental lesions, with a poor fetal prognosis.
The experts are therefore working on new therapeutic perspectives in order to offer the women concerned a chance to keep their babies. Already two patients have been successfully treated within the framework of this project and others will be soon.
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Pollution, genetics… All avenues are explored
But other lines of research are also explored, such as environmental and genetic leads. Thus the project will be able to rely on lARTEMIS, a platform for the prevention of environmental health during pregnancy and benefits from expertise in the field of ultrafine particles. The objective is to compare these results with in-vitro studies in order to quantify these nanoparticles within the placenta and to assess their impact on placental development.
Finally, although autopsy analyzes do not explain the occurrence of UFI in many cases, it is possible that certain genetic abnormalities are sometimes involved. The research team will go further by performing postnatal sequencing of the exome (part of the genome used by the body for protein synthesis) of fetal deaths in utero in order to try to identify certain genetic abnormalities.
This initiative is quite unprecedented in a field, pregnancy, in which research is relatively scarce due to the difficulty of conducting research in pregnant women. However, the stakes are high since today in 50% of cases after a miscarriage (less than 20 weeks of gestation), we cannot give families an explanation of its cause.