This Project Grant award of $717,285 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (CFDA 93.865: Child Health and Human Development Extramural Research) will support a large-scale investigation of the vaginal ecosystem in preeclampsia. The project aims to uncover the microbial and molecular properties of the vaginal ecosystem that may indicate, predispose to, or contribute to preeclampsia, a serious pregnancy complication.
The research team from Columbia University will conduct longitudinal metagenomic and metabolomic profiling of approximately 4,200 vaginal samples from 389 pregnancies with severe preeclampsia and 389 matched controls. They will also profile host immune factors to identify microbial associations with preeclampsia and explore the role of vaginal metabolites as mediators of host-microbiome interactions. This comprehensive dataset will inform the development of supervised machine learning models to predict the risk of preeclampsia early in pregnancy. The project includes a sub-award to the University of California, San Diego to develop robust protocols for analyzing the vaginal metabolome and create a reference library for microbe identification.