Apr 29, 2026 · 44 min · 19 segments
Dr. Thomas Jansson, the 2026 winner of the March of Dimes Agnes Higgins Award in Maternal-Fetal Nutrition, the Vice Chair of Research for the University of Colorado Anschutz Department of Obstetrics…
In years past, the thinking used to go that a baby in the womb was the main conductor of its growth.
It would independently regulate nutrient transfer across the placenta to feed its needs.
If a mother was sufficiently healthy and had good nutrition and metabolism, the baby would extract from the mother what it needed for its growth.
Well, that was only about 15 years ago, before the scientific community shifted longstanding assumptions away from the fetus and toward the mother and the placenta as the ultimate architects of fetal growth.
Dr. Thomas Jansson, a University of Colorado placental scientist and the 2026 recipient of the March of Dimes Agnes Higgins Award in Maternal-Fetal Nutrition, has spent years providing compelling evidence that the fetus is not, in fact, the main regulator of the function of the placenta and thus its own growth.
Instead, a mother's metabolic signals regulate the placenta with a special biological key that in turn controls fetal growth.
And that key, Dr. Jansson showed, was a placental mechanism called mTOR or mechanistic target of rapamycin.
A baby's growth trajectory, he showed, is highly dependent on whether this mTOR protein in the placenta is normal, activated, or inhibited, all levels of activity based on a mother's metabolic signals.
In other words, Dr. Jansson's work helped reshape our understanding of maternal fetal biology by showing that nutrient transfer to fetus, and thus fetal growth, is predominantly based on maternal supply, not on fetal demand, and that placental mTOR is the key gatekeeper at the heart of the process, influencing development either toward optimal growth, overgrowth, or growth restriction, the latter two of which are linked to pregnancy complications and increased risk of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease for the baby later in their adult life.
Dr. Jansson's mTOR finding was transformative, and it is inspiring the development of novel techniques and therapeutics that can put mothers and babies at risk of over or undergrowth on a better path.
This episode is about Dr. Jansson's award-winning work on placental mTOR and fetal growth.
In years past, the thinking used to go that a baby in the womb was the main conductor of its growth.
It would independently regulate nutrient transfer across the placenta to feed its needs.
If a mother was sufficiently healthy and had good nutrition and metabolism, the baby would extract from the mother what it needed for its growth.
Well, that was only about 15 years ago, before the scientific community shifted longstanding assumptions away from the fetus and toward the mother and the placenta as the ultimate architects of fetal growth.
Dr. Thomas Jansson, a University of Colorado placental scientist and the 2026 recipient of the March of Dimes Agnes Higgins Award in Maternal-Fetal Nutrition, has spent years providing compelling evidence that the fetus is not, in fact, the main regulator of the function of the placenta and thus its own growth.
Instead, a mother's metabolic signals regulate the placenta with a special biological key that in turn controls fetal growth.
And that key, Dr. Jansson showed, was a placental mechanism called mTOR or mechanistic target of rapamycin.
A baby's growth trajectory, he showed, is highly dependent on whether this mTOR protein in the placenta is normal, activated, or inhibited, all levels of activity based on a mother's metabolic signals.
In other words, Dr. Jansson's work helped reshape our understanding of maternal fetal biology by showing that nutrient transfer to fetus, and thus fetal growth, is predominantly based on maternal supply, not on fetal demand, and that placental mTOR is the key gatekeeper at the heart of the process, influencing development either toward optimal growth, overgrowth, or growth restriction, the latter two of which are linked to pregnancy complications and increased risk of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease for the baby later in their adult life.
Dr. Jansson's mTOR finding was transformative, and it is inspiring the development of novel techniques and therapeutics that can put mothers and babies at risk of over or undergrowth on a better path.
This episode is about Dr. Jansson's award-winning work on placental mTOR and fetal growth.
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