Key resource will help address complications in pregnancy

A new resource at the UCL Institute of Child Health (ICH) will help doctors and scientists address the four key complications in pregnancy. Jointly led by Professor Gudrun Moore (UCL ICH) and Professor Lesley Regan (St Mary's Hospital, Imperial College London), the resource ' known as the Baby Bio Bank ' will be the first study of its kind and the most extensive, as it will analyse maternal and paternal inheritance patterns. The four key complications during pregnancy are recurrent miscarriage, intrauterine growth restriction (abnormally small babies), pre-eclampsia (high-blood pressure in pregnancy) and preterm delivery. UK pregnancies end in miscarriage per annum, while over 50% of stillbirths remain unexplained. The resource will help doctors identify the inherited and biological nature of these complications. The resource will also store protein from the placenta for expression and translational studies (the process by which inheritable information from a gene is made into a functional gene product). The research at the bank will involve collecting blood samples from the parents and placenta from the babies affected by any of these complications.