The Stanford Neuro-Pregnancy Initiative

Pregnancy is an incredible journey in which the mother’s body and brain go through profound changes to support her and her growing baby. But we do not understand how the mother’s brain manages these changes or even how pregnancy affects memories, thinking, and emotions. This huge knowledge gap makes it challenging to treat conditions like pregnancy-related anxiety or depression that affect tens of millions of women globally every year. Our project is the first effort of its kind to understand how the brain adapts to and supports pregnancy.  Our foundational studies will be done in mice but we will use state-of-the-art technologies, including AI, to quickly pivot to studies that directly advance understanding of human pregnancies. We will develop and use cutting-edge tools to define and understand how pregnancy hormones guide brain cells to adapt and support pregnancy. In pilot studies in mice, we have already discovered brain cells that respond to estrogen and are crucial for a healthy pregnancy. In parallel, we will build the first-ever collection of biomarkers of pregnancy, a collection that we will expand with newer technologies. We are confident that these biomarkers will become a critical toolkit globally, both to study basic aspects of pregnancy in the lab and to provide the best possible pregnancy care in the clinic. We believe our project will revolutionize our basic understanding of pregnancy. By unlocking the secrets of the dialog between pregnancy hormones and the brain, our project will also lead to healthier mothers and babies.