Project summary
Gestational diabetes can increase the risk of mothers developing type 2 diabetes and heart problems later in life. It could also damage the placenta, which can pose a threat to babies in the womb. These problems might be due to a decrease in specialist immune cells during gestational diabetes. Dr Cristiano Scotta is developing a better way to study the placenta in the lab. His approach could potentially help to develop new treatments that better protect mothers and their babies during and after pregnancy.
Background to research
Gestational diabetes can develop during pregnancy. If left untreated, high blood sugar levels can cause serious health problems for mothers and their babies. For example, gestational diabetes can cause inflammation. This can damage the blood vessels in the placenta, affecting how well nutrients and oxygen can reach the baby in the womb. Inflammation also increases the risk of the mother developing type 2 diabetes and heart problems later in life.
Treg cells are a type of immune cell that usually works as the peacekeepers of the immune system, helping to tame inflammation. By studying animals, scientists have found that these cells could decrease in numbers or work less actively during gestational diabetes. But we can’t be sure we’d see the same in humans. Dr Cristiano Scotta hopes to develop a new ‘organ-on-a-chip' device that could better mimic the blood vessels and cells in the human placenta, giving researchers clearer insights into the role of Treg levels in people with gestational diabetes.
Research aims
Dr Scotta and his team will recruit pregnant women with and without gestational diabetes to gather blood and placenta samples that contain blood vessel cells and immune cells they hope to study.
They’ll use these samples to build a device that mimics how different cells coexist within the human placenta. They call this a ‘vasculature-on-a-chip’ model.
They’ll grow these chips under gestational diabetes conditions to see if and how the cells might interact differently. This could help them see how gestational diabetes affects Treg cell numbers, their activities, and the health of blood vessels in the placenta.
Potential benefit to people with diabetes
Gestational diabetes affects about 1 in 10 pregnancies, putting both mothers and babies at risk of complications during pregnancy and raising the chance of type 2 diabetes and heart disease later in life. This research aims to provide a better understanding of how gestational diabetes drives these health problems by damaging blood vessels in the placenta and affecting the immune system.
By developing a new method to study this, the research could also help scientists develop and test new treatments to protect the health of mothers and babies during pregnancy and in the years that follow.
