Temporary inconvenience or early warning signs? A new take on maternal symptoms in early pregnancy and their consequences.

Pregnancy is a unique time of life where mother and child live in symbiosis.

This relationship however induces multiple symptoms for mothers including nausea, vomiting, bleeding, pain, fatigue and many more. In their majority, symptoms pass without adverse consequences and are thus understudied.

Instead of a temporary inconvenience, what if maternal symptoms were the key to understanding and preventing harmful consequences for both mother and child?So far, research on pregnancy has primarily focused on complications, maternal survival, and fetal health.

Very little is known on the biological underpinnings of the wide range of symptoms mothers experience in the first half of pregnancy, leaving families and healthcare professionals inadequately informed about potential health consequences.

Nausea and vomiting is a notable exception, where fetally-expressed proteins have recently been demonstrated to cause maternal symptoms.

My recent research has further disentangled the respective contributions of the fetal and maternal genomes and characterized the trajectory of genetic signals over time.

In addition, my team has established innovative approaches to study proteins accounting for haplotypic variation, paving the way for new research on how symptoms are mediated between mother and child.

These findings open the opportunity to turn the tables, give overlooked maternal symptoms long overdue scientific attention, and unlock their potential in antenatal care.I hereby propose the creation of a new research framework that will 1) establish pregnancy profiles based on maternal symptoms, 2) reveal their genetic and proteomic underpinnings through the establishment of novel proteogenomic methods, and 3) resolve how maternal symptoms link to pregnancy complications and later health of mother and child.

This transformative project will close a long-standing knowledge gap, opening novel research avenues for the study of pregnancy and its consequences for mothers and children.