Aug 26, 2026 · 37 min · 12 segments
Dr. Ophelia Yin, an investigator at the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, on her recent research finding four new genes associated with…
Ophelia YinGuestOlesya PlekheHostyeah absolutely and um what about others in the field is this kind of the direction that that other scientists are going as well i mean did you just give me a pretty because you obviously gave me a nutshell of where your future research is heading but what about the rest of the field because i know that there are other papers that are growing the body of evidence in favor of the role of the uterus and one is a paper from probably colleagues of yours they're ucsf scientists with links to march of dimes dr jing jing li and dr chang wang They've identified a new uterine cell type.
DSC4, it regulates the proper invasion of fetal cells into the uterus by suppressing their invasiveness to just the right level.
They call these cells speed bump cells, and it may just turn out that bumps that are too strong could lead to preeclampsia, like too much suppression, and ones that are too weak, so not enough suppression, would lead to deep implantation and accreta.
And there's another paper from about 10 years ago that you sent me, and this paper found a uterine defect that caused impaired placental invasion.
So where does the field seem to be going here? And we can also talk about the placenta, right? It doesn't just have to be uterine cells.
Do we feel better about preeclampsia than we did five years ago? Where are we? What's the pulse of the scientific community with this condition right now?
I think going from this bulk sequencing to single cell where you can look at each individual cell has given us so much more information.
I think that now people are starting to develop kind of in lab almost organoid type models where you have some placenta cells and you have some uterine cells and you see how they communicate or you almost create like a 3D model of the maternal field interface in the lab.
So we're getting a lot more sophisticated in not just looking at one particular cell type or one particular pathway, but being able to look at a lot of things in a more global way.
And I think that what you're talking about with the uterine cells, people are continuing to identify new kind of cell types because we have this technology now to look at all the genes that are expressed.
I mean, in the past in science, you could look at one or two genes that are expressed per cell at once.
Now you can look at like in this study, I mean, tens of thousands of genes at once and and profile that cell what what its behavior really is.
We're identifying a lot of new cell types all the time in the uterus, in the placenta.
And even there is a to be Mackenzie, who is a A pediatric surgeon here has done a lot of interesting work on the maternal-fetal tolerance with Adrian Erlebacher here.
They have found these particular what they call air cells, specific immune cells that are really important for that maternal-fetal crosstalk and for that tolerance.
It's not just going to be one placental cell or one uterine cell or one immune cell.
And there's researchers just working on it in a lot of different avenues so that we can get closer.
For me, I think what's really important is that we not only study the biology of preeclampsia, but we think about how do we then translate that to preventative strategies and therapeutics? And how do we get patients their own data? Like how do you allow patients to be able to know over time what is happening in their body? um that i think is where a lot of science is going right patients want their own directed data their own health data this is happening in a lot of different parts of the field sometimes it's not happening within academics but it's happening with private companies and everything else like i think we need to get that data to individual patients too so i think that using these technologies and starting to move towards that personalized way of prevention treatment disease profiling diagnosis is is going to be how we get everything for preeclampsia from the lab really into the clinical space in a way that's going to benefit patients today.
yeah absolutely and um what about others in the field is this kind of the direction that that other scientists are going as well i mean did you just give me a pretty because you obviously gave me a nutshell of where your future research is heading but what about the rest of the field because i know that there are other papers that are growing the body of evidence in favor of the role of the uterus and one is a paper from probably colleagues of yours they're ucsf scientists with links to march of dimes dr jing jing li and dr chang wang They've identified a new uterine cell type.
DSC4, it regulates the proper invasion of fetal cells into the uterus by suppressing their invasiveness to just the right level.
They call these cells speed bump cells, and it may just turn out that bumps that are too strong could lead to preeclampsia, like too much suppression, and ones that are too weak, so not enough suppression, would lead to deep implantation and accreta.
And there's another paper from about 10 years ago that you sent me, and this paper found a uterine defect that caused impaired placental invasion.
So where does the field seem to be going here? And we can also talk about the placenta, right? It doesn't just have to be uterine cells.
Do we feel better about preeclampsia than we did five years ago? Where are we? What's the pulse of the scientific community with this condition right now?
I think going from this bulk sequencing to single cell where you can look at each individual cell has given us so much more information.
I think that now people are starting to develop kind of in lab almost organoid type models where you have some placenta cells and you have some uterine cells and you see how they communicate or you almost create like a 3D model of the maternal field interface in the lab.
So we're getting a lot more sophisticated in not just looking at one particular cell type or one particular pathway, but being able to look at a lot of things in a more global way.
And I think that what you're talking about with the uterine cells, people are continuing to identify new kind of cell types because we have this technology now to look at all the genes that are expressed.
I mean, in the past in science, you could look at one or two genes that are expressed per cell at once.
Now you can look at like in this study, I mean, tens of thousands of genes at once and and profile that cell what what its behavior really is.
We're identifying a lot of new cell types all the time in the uterus, in the placenta.
And even there is a to be Mackenzie, who is a A pediatric surgeon here has done a lot of interesting work on the maternal-fetal tolerance with Adrian Erlebacher here.
They have found these particular what they call air cells, specific immune cells that are really important for that maternal-fetal crosstalk and for that tolerance.
It's not just going to be one placental cell or one uterine cell or one immune cell.
And there's researchers just working on it in a lot of different avenues so that we can get closer.
For me, I think what's really important is that we not only study the biology of preeclampsia, but we think about how do we then translate that to preventative strategies and therapeutics? And how do we get patients their own data? Like how do you allow patients to be able to know over time what is happening in their body? um that i think is where a lot of science is going right patients want their own directed data their own health data this is happening in a lot of different parts of the field sometimes it's not happening within academics but it's happening with private companies and everything else like i think we need to get that data to individual patients too so i think that using these technologies and starting to move towards that personalized way of prevention treatment disease profiling diagnosis is is going to be how we get everything for preeclampsia from the lab really into the clinical space in a way that's going to benefit patients today.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
