Irish professor leads bid for medical breakthrough
The consortium, led by Professor Louise Kenny of University College Cork, has just secured €6m in EU funding to trial two prototype tests for pre-eclampsia — a complex condition where high blood pressure arises in the second half of pregnancy.
There is currently no accurate screening test for the condition which accounts for up to 24% of maternal deaths in Europe and over 500,000 infant deaths worldwide every year.
It is difficult to predict and occurs in up to 4% of all pregnancies.
Prof Kenny, a professor of obstetrics and a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Cork University Maternity Hospital, said developing an effective test would revolutionise prenatal care.
“Pre-eclampsia affects almost one in 20 first-time mothers, and globally causes approximately 70,000 maternal deaths each year,” Professor Kenny said.
“A new blood test at around 15 to 20 weeks of pregnancy, combined with specific patient information, would give us a fairly accurate indication of that person’s risk of developing pre-eclampsia. An indication that early would allow clinicians embark on tailor-made treatments, such as aspirin, that could even prevent the development of pre-eclampsia.”
Prof Kenny’s team will establish a pregnancy bio-bank with blood samples collected from 5,000 first-time pregnant women in Ireland, Britain, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.
They will be recruited by UCC, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Klinikum der Universitaet zu Koeln, University of Liverpool, Karolinska Institute and the University of Keele — all major obstetric centres with a track record in the research and management of pre-eclampsia.
The research team will then use these blood samples to test and refine two prototype screening tests for pre-eclampsia.
One of the new tests was developed at UCC and funded by the Health Research Board and Science Foundation Ireland.
The work is being undertaken in association with two companies, UCC spin-out firm Metabolomic Diagnostics Ltd, and Pronota NV of Belgium, experts in the discovery and development of blood-borne bio-markers for disease prediction. Prof Kenny said they hope to have initial findings within two years, and market-ready tests by the end of the four-year study.
Some of the team members arrived in Ireland yesterday to discuss the launch of the research, which should begin recruiting women for the clinical phase of the study next March.
Pre-eclampsia is the condition which killed the character Lady Sybil in a recent episode of the BBC period drama Downton Abbey.
