Pre-eclampsia
Research identifying the risk factors of pre-eclampsia
Overview
affects up to five per cent of first pregnancies.
Our Centre for Advanced Discovery and Experimental Therapeutics (CADET) aims to develop better predictive tools for pre-eclampsia and other major diseases.
State-of-the-art equipment within CADET is now being used for clinical proteomics studies. Methods developed within the facility have enabled the identification of new biomarkers, which are associated with pre-eclampsia. These biomarkers are now being validated in a large number of clinical samples.
Problem
To date there is no effective method of identifying which mothers will be affected by pre-eclampsia and therefore it is a major international research aim to develop a better screening test.
This would allow us to provide appropriate surveillance for women and design better preventative treatments. A number of proteins measured in early pregnancy have been associated with the subsequent development of pre-eclampsia, but none of these are good enough to be useful in clinical practice.
What we have achieved to date
Recent advances in proteomic technologies have enabled the relative quantification of thousands of proteins in clinical samples. Researchers in our CADET centre have being using a technique called iTRAQ to identify a number of proteins which differ in abundance between a healthly pregnancy and pre-eclampsia at 15 week gestation in plasma samples. The proteins which have been identified had not previously been associated with pre-eclampsia and prior to the development of a new screening test using these biomarkers, much larger verification studies are necessary. Until recently, this phase of biomarker development studies has been difficult to undertake. This was due to the lack of a robust, cost effective method to enable the quantification of the multiple proteins in a small volume of sample.
Equipment within the CADET centre will allow us to use multiple reaction monitoring, a highly specific mass spectrometry technique which can be used to quantify 15-20 proteins in a large number of samples from very small sample volumes. We have developed a novel work flow using this technology to quantify our novel candidate biomarkers in clinical samples. This means we can build predictive algorithms which can be used in clinical practice to identify women at high risk of developing pre-eclampsia.
What we aim to achieve
Our researchers will continue to use this technique to quantify these proteins, to determine which biomarkers have the best predictive power. Working with bioinformaticians based at the CADET centre, we will combine data from multiple proteins with clinical metadata to build predictive algorithms for pre-eclampsia. These algorithms will be validated in much larger numbers, around 5500. These predictive algorithms can then be used in clinical practice to identify women at high risk of developing pre-eclampsia.Importantly, the techniques that have been developed in the context of pre-eclampsia, are applicable to many other conditions currently being researched within the BRC. These technologies will be applied to the prediction of many of these conditions in the future.
