Lauren Richardson
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Preterm birth is one of the leading causes of illness and death in newborns. Many problem pregnancies trace back to stress in the tissues where mother and fetus meet: the placenta, the fetal membranes and the decidua, which is the mother's uterine lining.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
preterm birth
adverse pregnancy outcomes
placenta
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Adapt a multi-organ feto-maternal interface chip with a temperature-controlled flow system that perfuses 39°C medium on the maternal side, mimicking heat carried by maternal blood.
- Identify heat-induced regulatory changes in placental, decidual and fetal membrane cells by combining microRNA sequencing with quantitative proteomics on the organ chip.
- Characterize the microRNA and protein cargo of maternal and fetal extracellular vesicles, separated using the placental marker PLAP, to find candidate biomarkers of heat-associated preterm birth.
- Engineer trimester-specific five-chamber placenta–decidua organ-on-chip models with matched oxygen levels, with or without maternal decidual immune cells, to represent healthy pregnancy.
- Model oxidative stress and inflammation on the trimester chips and test whether N-acetyl-L-cysteine (an antioxidant) or interleukin-10 (an anti-inflammatory signal) prevents the damage.
More about the research
Studying these tissues in people is very hard, and animal models and simple cell cultures miss much of human biology. The lab therefore builds organ-on-a-chip devices. These are small devices with chambers and channels that grow several human cell types together, connected as they are in the womb. The chips are used to study how risk factors such as heat, oxidative stress and inflammation disrupt this interface.
Why it matters
About 11% of pregnancies have adverse outcomes, often ending in preterm birth, and no proven interventions exist to prevent them. Human placenta chips could let researchers test protective treatments without relying on animal models. Molecules carried in vesicles after heat exposure could become biomarkers for flagging high-risk pregnancies. This may help pregnant people as heat exposure rises.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rashmi Sood
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Physiology
Identify and phenotype the immune cell populations that change in the decidua, the uterine lining that meets the placenta, and track their trafficking into and out of the tissue as clots form and abruption develops in EPCR-deficient mice.
Whitney Cowell
New York University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Adapt microplastic measurement methods from environmental and marine samples to human placentas from NYU CHES pregnancies. Identify exposure sources, including changeable lifestyle factors and contamination in the delivery room and lab.
Mana M Parast
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether villitis of unknown etiology (VUE) linked to fetal growth restriction has a distinct cellular profile of chronic immune responses and trophoblast or endothelial damage, using mass cytometry on banked placental tissue.
The school
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston: 14 labs on PI Pages, $241M a year on research, 141 research doctorates a year.
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