A UW Medicine OB-GYN has received a Doris Duke Foundation grant to study preeclampsia, a disorder of pregnancy that is not well understood by clinicians despite many decades of research. The condition causes 70,000 maternal deaths and 500,000 fetal deaths worldwide each year.
Dr. Stephen McCartney will study how the immune system functions during normal pregnancies and those that involve preeclampsia, a hypertensive disorder that occurs during pregnancy or the postpartum period.
He will focus on the activity of innate lymphoid cells, which sense the nutrients and inflammatory signals on mucosal surfaces in the body, such as the gut and lungs.
“These cells respond to inflammatory and metabolic stimuli, but their function during pregnancy is unknown,” he said. “In other tissues, they help activate or turn off immune responses. It’s like a thermostat, telling the body to turn inflammation on or off.”
