Scientific American: Could Blood Filtering Help Treat One of Pregnancy’s Most Deadly Conditions?
Scientific American recently interviewed Ravi Thadhani, MD, MPH, chief medical officer of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Health System, about a potential new approach to treat preeclampsia, a common, sometimes life-threatening pregnancy condition that causes dangerously high blood pressure.
Preeclampsia affects up to 8% of women who give birth worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. In severe cases, physicians must deliver babies prematurely to protect the mother, which increases infants’ risk of breathing problems, infections and developmental delays.
In a study co-authored by Thadhani and Ananth Karumanchi, MD, director of the Renovascular Research Center at Cedars-Sinai, investigators focused on removing a harmful protein from the mother’s blood, which proved effective in safely extending pregnancy. Results from the small, pilot study were published in the journal Nature Medicine.
“We’re excited about this,” Thadhani told Scientific American. “It’s the first time anyone has developed a targeted treatment for this condition.”
Thadhani, executive vice president of Clinical Affairs, said investigators avoided potential fetal risk by removing the preeclampsia-linked protein sFlt-1 from the blood of 16 women through filtering, rather than targeting it with antibodies inside the body.
“This way, we [didn’t] have to worry about anything crossing the placenta, and we could turn off the machine if a woman had a complication,” he told Scientific American.
Thadhani said the method stabilized high blood pressure and extended pregnancies to roughly twice as long as expected.
“Extension is a key component, because if a woman is at 29 weeks or 32 weeks, the goal is to get her to 34 weeks, 36 weeks and let the baby grow,” he said.
Thadhani told Scientific American that while the findings need confirmation in larger clinical trials, “this is the end of the beginning” in “finally developing a strategy to target this condition for which we’ve never had a treatment.”
Read the complete article from Scientific American.