Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Ideas

Like all biological structures, the placenta is the outcome of a historical evolutionary process. Thus, in order to understand the development, structure, and (dys)function of the placenta we must reconstruct the developmental evolutionary history of the maternal-fetal interface. The NICHD Human Placenta Project covers a wide breadth of research topics, but a noticeable gap is the lack of evolutionary studies that explicitly... more »

There is a clear gap in our ability to investigate the placenta and pregnancy risk in the first trimester of pregnancy on a cellular level.

It is well established that protein expression is different in placental cells of pregnancies that developed placental disorders including severe preeclampsia (PE). This idea exploits the fact that the placenta naturally sheds hundreds of trophoblast cells into the cervical canal... more »

Understanding the placenta from the cell unit constitution and the detailed cell diversity using new tools such as single cell approaches. The complexity of placental functions as a result of the integrated interaction between all trophoblasts subtypes, there is a big gap on the knowledge regarding the exact placental cellular diversity and individual functions (functional nodes). What we know so far and which are the... more »