News & Events: Pregnancy Complications after Fetal Surgery

UCSF News report on how the immune system drives pregnancy complications after fetal surgery in mice. As a fetal surgeon at UC San Francisco, Tippi MacKenzie, MD, has long known that conducting surgery on a fetus to correct a problems such as spina bifida often results in preterm labor and premature birth. Now, MacKenzie and her UCSF colleagues have shown that, in mice at least, pregnancy complications after fetal surgery are triggered by activation of the mother's T cells – the same T cells that cause the body to reject a donor organ after transplant surgery "Here at UCSF, the [...]