Skip to main content
2024 BMES Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.

Womens Health

Women's Health - Poster Session E

Poster L21 - Remote Immunosurveillance of the Developing Placenta and Uterine Microenvironments via Tissue Engineering Scaffold Implants

Saturday, October 26, 2024
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EST
Location: Exhibit Hall E, F & G

Introduction:  The uterus is uniquely considered both an alloimmune and autoimmune organ due to its vital immunological roles during processes like pregnancy and menstruation. Although the inflammatory mechanisms are not yet widely understood, alloimmune responses in the uterine and placental environments during pregnancy lead to complications such as preeclampsia and fetal growth restriction, and autoimmune responses to endometrial tissue outside of the uterus during menstruation lead to the debilitating condition of endometriosis. There is a great need for a minimally invasive method of surveilling the uterine immune environment and predicting complications to improve prenatal health and reduce pelvic pain. In this work, we employ microporous polymeric scaffolds as implanted synthetic immune sites to remotely monitor the uterine-specific immune responses in a series of allogeneic and syngeneic murine models of intrauterine inflammation and endometriosis.

Materials and

Methods:  To remotely monitor the placental niche, porous poly(ε-caprolactone) scaffolds were implanted subcutaneously in CBA female mice prior to cohabitation with BALB/c or DBA/2 males to initiate normotensive or preeclamptic-like pregnancies, respectively. Scaffolds were serially removed prior to cohabitation and on embryonic days (E) 53.5, 6.5, 9.5, 12.5, and 15.5 of pregnancy. Blood, spleen, uterus, placentae, and implanted scaffold cells were characterized by flow cytometry and T cell assays. Scaffolds and placentae are also being prepared for gene expression sequencing and analysis for pathway enrichment and differential gene expression across gestation.

To derive minimally-invasive biomarkers of endometriosis, C57BL/6 female donor mice were ovariectomized then primed with subcutaneous injections of β-estradiol and progesterone. Sesame oil was injected into each uterine horn to induce artificial decidualization. Five days later, donor endometrium was harvested, suspended in PBS, and injected into the intraperitoneal cavity of C57BL/6 recipients who had received poly(ε-caprolactone) scaffold implants prior to injection. Mice will be euthanized 21 days post-injection, when scaffolds and endometriosis-like lesions will be harvested and characterized by flow cytometry.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: In healthy and preeclamptic-like pregnancies, the scaffold implant recapitulates the immune microenvironment of the uterus and placentae with greater tissue specificity than can be found in circulation. In addition, immune cells in the scaffold exhibit tissue residency similar to the placentae and uterus and similarly promote fetal trophoblast migration and proliferation in vitro. These preliminary data indicate that these minimally invasive scaffolds distinguish these immune environments through their dynamic cell phenotypes and gene expression. We will continue to develop this minimally invasive implant as a personalized diagnostic tool for uterine immunological complications and pave the way for future women’s health research in pregnancy and endometriosis.

Acknowledgements (Optional):