A new animal model for investigating the mechanisms underlying poor child health outcomes following maternal infections in pregnancy

Dr Naomi Scott: Stewart/BrightSpark Fellow

Attenuation of maternal inflammation to promote normal offspring neuro-immune development

Raine Priming Grant

$150,000

2019 - 2021

Telethon Kids Institute

Dr Naomi Scott is a Senior Research Officer at the Telethon Kids Institute and the UWA Centre for Child Health Research. She was awarded a Raine Priming Grant in 2019 to investigate how infections during preganancy can be harmful to the health of the mother and child.

During pregnancy, the child’s immune and nervous system are still developing and are susceptible to perturbation. Maternal inflammation from respiratory infections during pregnancy is associated with long-term poor outcomes for the child including asthma, autism and schizophrenia, which is thought to be due to perturbation to the immune and nervous system during development.

In the current project, Dr Scott and her team aimed to better understand the mechanisms that cause this to occur, which would be the first step towards developing new treatments. They developed a novel animal model to investigate such mechanisms underlying the impact of infections during pregnancy on maternal disease and fetal growth.

While their findings indicated minimal changes in three week-old offspring mice delivered from influenza affected mothers, future studies utilising their novel animal model may reveal altered immune function once the offspring is exposed to an infection themselves, as it is frequently that dysregulation becomes apparent once the child’s immune system is challenged.

The work in this grant has contributed to the field by optimising advanced technologies (RNAseq, high-end flow cytometry, and artificial intelligence) to interrogate mechanistic changes within individual compartments that contain incredibly small numbers of cells. Previously, only data on more global changes in entire organs was able to be collected. This mechanistic data may lead to improved health outcomes by informing therapeutic options for inflammation during pregnancy.

Dr Scott reflected on the Raine Priming Grant outcomes, expressing that the grant has assisted her research career through collaboration and upskilling in bio-informatic techniques, high end flow cytometry panel development, and behavioural analysis techniques, which she will continue to build on in her future research.