Grant: Project Grant

Preeclampsia is a deadly disease of pregnancy that kills up to 70,000 mothers and 500,000 infants globally each year. Preeclampsia is difficult to predict until the disease starts, frequently observed as hypertension (high blood pressure) and kidney damage (proteins in the urine). Preeclampsia is untreatable except for delivering the baby. It is known that there is a genetic inheritance for the risk of preeclampsia. However, finding gene mutations that lead to disease has been largely unsuccessful. We have created a novel method that considers how genes usually interact and looks for combinations of mutations in different genes that are linked to disease. Our preliminary analysis of 1,500 preeclampsia cases identified exciting links to blood vessel development, cell feeding, secretion, and hormone synthesis. Significantly while these pathways were known to be affected by preeclampsia, no genetic mutations were found in these pathways. In the proposal, we wish to develop our method further and apply it to a more extensive data set of over 25,000 preeclampsia cases to confirm and expand our findings. Importantly, this new data set will be more ethnically diverse, containing African American, Hispanic and Asian patients than our preliminary data set. Our results will lead to new genetic tests for preeclampsia and new targets for developing therapies.