I think our first step is to try to
understand whether this animal model
that we have is a faithful reproduction
of what happens in the human what we
found is that when oxygen is lowered for
a half an hour to the fetus one day
later after that hypoxic episode there
was a lot of inflammation in the fetus
and in particular in the fetal brain we
find this really interesting because we
discovered that there was the appearance
of bacteria in the brains of the fetuses
this bacteria very likely is the cause
of the inflammation that the bacteria
that showed up in the in the brains of
the fetuses matched exactly bacteria
that we could find in the placenta and
what this suggested to us is that the
that there is a movement of bacteria
from the placenta into the fetus after
this hypoxia
episode but I think that that what we're
finding is a new avenue for
communication with the fetus and and
treatment of the fetus
