Grant: Project Grant

Gestational diabetes is a condition diagnosed between the 24th and 28th weeks of pregnancy. It comes from a problem about how sugar is transported into cells. This condition affects up to 26% of pregnancies. It may increase the risk of complications. There has been an increase of gestational diabetes cases over the last 20 years. This condition is a real public health problem. Unfortunately, the tools we use only enable us to diagnose and treat elevated blood glucose sugar once it is present and thus only after it has started to affect the health of the mother and her baby. Accordingly, the World Health Organization (WHO) strongly recommends that gestational diabetes should be detected and treated earlier during pregnancy. In that context, microRNAs can play a big role and unlock many possibilities. MicroRNAs are small genetic sequences that control numerous aspects of our biology. They can travel from one organ to another in the human body. They could thus reveal early problems that appear before gestational diabetes develops. Recent studies have revealed their enormous potential to follow the development of diseases including diabetes. Our pilot study strongly suggests that this also applies to diabetes in pregnancy. It supports new promising possibilities to develop innovative prediction tools based on miRNAs that can be found in the first trimester of pregnancy. Based on our exciting recent findings, we thus propose to develop a miRNAs-based tool for prediction of diabetes during pregnancy. Our project uses the most modern techniques available to seek microRNAs in maternal blood. We aim to find the best candidates for the prediction of gestational diabetes. These discoveries will later enable us to understand and intervene before the apparition of elevated blood sugar and its harmful health effects on the mother and her child.