Nardhy Gomez-Lopez, PhD, Director of the Center for Outpatient Health, and her team of collaborators, has been published in Science Translational Medicine.
Pregnancy depends on a remarkable immunological dialogue between mother and fetus. At the maternal-fetal interface, these two immune systems must communicate, adapt, and coexist without rejection. In this study, we built a comprehensive multi-omic atlas of chronic placental inflammation (CPI) to understand what happens when this balance is disrupted. By integrating imaging mass cytometry, single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and T-cell receptor analysis, we found that CPI involves a complex network of maternal and fetal immune cells and altered immune crosstalk across the placenta. Notably, CPI is not one uniform immune state: preterm CPI is more effector-dominant, whereas term CPI shows more regulatory and homeostatic features.
The team is grateful to all of our collaborators and supporters, including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).