Could blood filtration help treat one of pregnancy’s deadliest conditions?

Could blood filtration help treat one of pregnancy’s deadliest conditions?

Preeclampsia can be fatal during pregnancy and, aside from childbirth, the condition has no targeted treatment. New study suggests filtering blood with antibodies could help

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

Preeclampsia is a life-threatening condition that occurs during pregnancy and is characterized by high blood pressure and protein in the urine. It is also common: in the United States, until about one in 12 pregnancies will be marked by preeclampsia. Despite its frequency, this condition has no cure other than childbirth, which can lead to premature birth and other complications. But new preliminary research indicates a possible alternative: blood filtering.

In a pilot trial involving 16 women with premature preeclampsia, researchers found that filtering a protein called sFlt-1 from pregnant women’s blood was both safe and could slightly reduce their blood pressure. More research is needed, but the findings could one day lead to a long-sought treatment for preeclampsia, the authors say.

“We are excited about this. [It’s the] This is the first time anyone has developed a targeted treatment for this disease,” says Ravi Thadhani, lead author of the study and executive vice president of clinical affairs and chief medical officer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Health System.

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Certain blood filtration techniques, such as kidney diseaseare well established. But this filtering has also gained attention in the wellness world, with celebrities and influencers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Orlando Bloom And Simon Cowell touting “cleansing” or filtering blood as an anti-aging therapy or as a way to rid the body of microplastics, for example – but these applications have not been fully clinically tested.

In the new study published in the journal Natural medicine On Monday, blood filtering served as a medical solution of sorts: Thadhani and his team hypothesized that they might be able to target a preeclampsia-related protein called sFlt-1 with an antibody, but they worried that adding it to a pregnant person’s blood could potentially harm the fetus. Instead, they decided to filter proteins from the participating women’s blood and then return them.

“In this way, we [didn’t] we have to worry about anything that crosses the placenta, and we could turn off the machine if a woman had a complication,” says Thadhani.

The team first tested the process in baboons and five non-pregnant volunteers before moving on to pregnant women admitted to hospital with premature preeclampsia. During the first phase of the trial, seven of the women received a blood filtration cycle, which lasted approximately one hour to two hours. During the second phase, nine women were eligible for multiple rounds of screening. Of these nine, three participants received one treatment, five women received two treatments, and one participant received three treatments.

During the second phase, women saw their sFlt-1 levels drop by almost 17% on average. At the same time, their blood pressure “stabilized,” Thadhani says, and their respective pregnancies lasted about 10 days after hospital admission, about twice as long as researchers would expect from untreated pregnant women, suggesting that the protocol could extend the length of gestation. “Prolongation is a key part, because if a woman is at 29 or 32 weeks, the goal is to get her to 34 or 36 weeks and let the baby grow,” he says.

The results need to be verified in a larger randomized trial, says Hyagriv Simhan, professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who also was not involved in the study. Still, he adds, the findings are “intriguing and exciting.”

“I like the idea of ​​providing a possible evidence-based therapy for preeclampsia,” Simhan says. “It’s absolutely necessary and there is, I think, a biological rationale for this intervention.”

“This is an important study that offers hope to a group of women with severe early-onset preeclampsia. The results are consistent [with] our understanding of the pathophysiology of the disease,” says Kypros Nicolaides, professor of fetal medicine at King’s College London, who was also not involved in the study.

Thadhani says the research team hopes to conduct a randomized controlled trial and study other proteins that might be linked to preeclampsia and that might also be filtered in the same way. Researchers also hope to test the protocol earlier in pregnancy, before a pregnant person becomes seriously ill.

“We need to understand security better. We need to start earlier. We need to be more aggressive,” Thadhani says. “But it’s the end of the beginning, as they say, to finally develop a strategy to target this disease for which we’ve never had a treatment.”