Fore Hadley & Children’s Mercy Hospital
The issue they are looking to solve:
Congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) is a serious birth defect where a baby’s diaphragm doesn’t form properly, allowing organs to move into the chest and prevent the lungs from developing fully. Doctors can estimate how severe CDH is before birth using ultrasound and MRI measurements of lung size and liver position. But even when two babies have similar measurements, one might recover well while the other becomes very sick — and we don’t fully understand why.
What this study will do:
This project will study proteins found in amniotic fluid (the fluid surrounding the baby before birth) and tracheal aspirate samples (fluid from the baby’s airway after birth). By looking at the proteins present in babies with mild, moderate, and severe CDH, the team hopes to find biological differences that explain why outcomes vary.
They’ll use a cutting-edge technology called Olink Explore, which can measure over 3,000 proteins from small samples with high accuracy. This will show which proteins are more or less active in babies with different severities of CDH.
Why it matters:
Using their findings, the results will:
Build a large, detailed protein database for CDH based on disease severity.
Help identify biomarkers (specific proteins) that predict how sick a baby might get.
Improve prenatal counseling and decision-making about who might benefit from prenatal treatment.
Complement previous genetic (RNA) studies to give a fuller picture of how lung development goes wrong in CDH.
In short:
This study looks beyond anatomy to find the biological signals that determine how severe CDH becomes, with the goal of improving advanced diagnosis, customizing treatments, and more successful outcomes for affected newborns.
