Secrets of life in a spoonful of blood - Babymoon Inn Birth Center

From time to time, we have lab companies come in and present information about new testing and technology available to offer our clients.   As we sat in the presentation, the complex ethical questions were apparent – especially as we started to consider the future application of the developing technology.  With the availability of more information comes the ultimate question – what do you DO with that information?  A recent article explores the potential available in the very testing we were discussing:

Secrets of Life in a Spoonful of Blood:  The intricate development of the fetus is yielding its long-held secrets to state-of-the-art molecular technologies that can make use of the mother’s blood.   By Claire Ainsworth, Nature.com

Now, a crop of molecular technologies is giving scientists tantalizing hints about how to fill in those gaps. Improved ways of reading and interpreting the information in fetal genetic material are uncovering a raft of genes involved in human development, and letting researchers eavesdrop on the hum of gene activity before birth. They can see which genes turn on or off at pivotal moments, and sense how the environment nurtures or intrudes on this.

Even the vital life-support system that we jettison at birth — the placenta — is laying bare its secrets. “It really is this great mystery in reproduction,” says Zev Williams, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. “It’s obviously such a critical part of human development, but it’s been so understudied.”

Until now, much of the work has relied on amniotic or placental samples obtained during routine invasive tests such as amniocentesis. But scientists are eyeing the next step: studies that are non-invasive for the fetus and are done on a teaspoonful of blood drawn from a pregnant woman’s arm. In this way, researchers could monitor fetuses as they develop and, down the line, develop non-invasive tests for a broad range of conditions, in both fetus and mother.

It is always hard to balance the right to know against the potential harm of revealing the presence of a DNA variant — especially if scientists can’t be sure what the effect of that variant will be, says Shendure. “It’s just going to get really tricky.”

Very tricky, indeed!  Read the full article – what do you think?

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