# Electrochemical Liquid Biopsy Assessing Placental Health

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES · 2021 · $645,071

## Abstract

Placental health is essential for the well-being of pregnancy, with implications for mother and offspring's lifelong
health. Recognition exists that aberrations in placental implantation, cellular development and/or maturation
adversely affect the materno-fetal supply of nutrients with detrimental effects on the developing newborn.
Currently the clinical tools available for assessing placental well-being consist of ultrasound (U/S), and secondary
analysis of maternal tests performed for other indications, such as fetal aneuploidies; these include serum
biomarkers, non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), and invasive procedures accessing chorionic villi, amniotic
fluid or umbilical venous blood. However many if not all of these diagnostic modalities are plagued with limitations
either related to suboptimal sensitivity, specificity and accuracy in predictability, or related to the invasive nature
of testing with possible complications. Hence, there is a dire need for non-invasive and easy to deploy diagnostic
tools that portray high sensitivity and specificity in predicting placental health. At a minimum, the ability to deploy
a screening test early in 1st trimester towards recommending a more elaborate imaging to assess placental health
is necessary. To this end, our preliminary data on a prospectively established cohort demonstrated that maternal
plasma and urine collected longitudinally through pregnancy can be analyzed for a combination of cfDNA, cfRNA,
exosome RNA/miRNA, and proteins, arising from placenta. To overcome the cumbersome analysis of cfDNA,
cfRNA and exosome RNA/micro(mi)RNA/proteins by traditional methods, we have most recently developed an
electromagnetic and electrochemical biosensor based technology named “electrochemical liquid biopsy” (eLB),
for separation and identification of RNAs and proteins from bodily fluid (e.g. urine, saliva) samples. This novel
technology provides us the ability in non-invasively investigating key transcripts/proteins that display high
sensitivity, specificity and predictability of subsequent clinical placental disorders. Based on this collection of
preliminary data, we hypothesize that a non-invasive biosensor capable of rapidly detecting RNAs/miRNAs and
proteins in urine will allow longitudinal detection of placental health in a reliable manner. Such a tool if made
ultimately available for point-of-care testing can revolutionize monitoring of placental health in real-time during
pregnancy with accuracy, allowing timely introduction of novel interventions (e.g. statins) to prevent and thereby
terminate placenta-associated clinical disorders. To test this hypothesis we propose two specific aims: 1) To
develop and test an eLB device in separation and simultaneous measurement of multiple transcripts/proteins in
urine collected longitudinally during normal pregnancies. 2) To determine the ability and validity in deploying the
electrochemical biosensor tool in detecting transcript/protein differences betwe...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10178068
- **Project number:** 5R01HD100015-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
- **Principal Investigator:** Sherin U Devaskar
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $645,071
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-08-15 → 2024-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10178068

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10178068, Electrochemical Liquid Biopsy Assessing Placental Health (5R01HD100015-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10178068. Licensed CC0.

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