Priya Pantham, PhD and her Lab Team are Discovering the Next Generation of Placenta & Preeclampsia Scientific Research with Passion to Improve Health in Pregnancy

I was born in Chennai (Madras), India, and migrated to New Zealand as a teenager with my family. My Master’s and PhD supervisor, Professor Larry Chamley, was my primary inspiration to pursue placental research. After completing my Doctoral degree at the University of Auckland, I migrated to the U.S. to undertake postdoctoral fellowships in placental biology at the Univ. of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, TX, the Univ. of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver, CO, and the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Campaign, IL prior to moving to UC San Diego. My singular driving force to conduct research has always been a deep passion for understanding and improving health in pregnancy, with the goal of building a world where each pregnant individual and their baby receives healthcare and support tailored to their unique needs.

I joined Professor Louise Laurent’s lab in the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine as an Assistant Project Scientist with an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence grant in August 2019. I transitioned to an Assistant Professor role in October 2021.

Pantham Lab Research and Discovery

Research in my lab focuses on the role of the human placenta, particularly placental extracellular vesicles, (EVs) as carriers of molecular cargo that may play a role in health and disease. My K99/R00 research project involves using next generation sequencing to identify RNA biomarkers of preeclampsia, a placental disorder, in maternal urine. While in Professor Laurent’s lab, I optimized methods to conduct automated and miniaturized transcriptomic profiling of maternal urine in pregnancy, which to our knowledge has been conducted for the first time. I am currently utilizing these methods in my own lab to profile >500 maternal urine samples from normal and preeclamptic pregnancies collected over several years which form part of the UCSD Perinatal Biorepository.

Our lab is also interested in investigating the effect of placental EVs trafficked to maternal organs, particularly the kidney in preeclampsia, which is often characterized by proteinuria and glomerular endotheliosis in addition to maternal hypertension. To this end, we are in the process of establishing the use of a novel validated 3D kidney-on-a-chip model (Emulate, Inc.) to test the functional effects of placental EVs on renal cell types in the kidney in preeclampsia compared to normal pregnancy. We have also conducted a pilot study comparing maternal urine and serum from normal, preeclamptic, and HELLP (hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, and low platelets) pregnancies and identified microRNAs (miRNAs) of interest that may originate from the placenta and play a role in renal dysfunction seen in preeclampsia, which we will investigate in mechanistic studies using our kidney-on-a-chip model as well as a mouse model in tandem.

Pantham Lab Research at UC San Diego

Meet the Pantham Lab Team Members

Dr. Pantham shown center with her Research Lab Team

 Dr. Priya Pantham Lab with Dr. Louise Laurent Lab at Jacobs Christmas Party

Research Goals

Our overall goal is to identify novel molecular pathways which could be targeted by therapeutics to prevent the acute and chronic manifestations of PE. To this end, we were awarded the Preeclampsia Foundation Canada Vision Grant 2021 and the Center for Perinatal Discovery Pilot Grant 2022. I was most recently invited to present at the Mother Infant Research Institute Seminar Series at the Tufts Medical Center in Boston, MA in Nov 2022. Our work will also be presented as posters and an invited talk at a workshop “Beyond 2D - novel culture approaches to improve the way we study the placenta” at the International Federation of Placenta Associations (IFPA) meeting in Rotorua, New Zealand, in Sep 2023.

In addition to our ongoing funded research, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked in collaboration with Assistant Professor Marni Jacobs on a project comparing the humoral immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination in pregnant versus nonpregnant women, and we found that pregnant women appeared to mount a non-differential humoral immune response to SARS-CoV-2 compared to non-pregnant women. Our work was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Global Reports.

Mentoring Philosophy

My research has thrived since moving to UC San Diego thanks to my amazing mentor, Professor Laurent, and the opportunities she has provided me along the way. I am also grateful to Professor Mana Parast (Department of Pathology), who was a Co-mentor on my K99 grant. Having two exemplary mentors has illustrated one key mentoring philosophy: Pay it forward. Thanks to their support, I am now able to provide mentorship myself to undergraduate and Master’s students at UC San Diego. I am particularly focused on promoting diversity in academia. I am passionate about mentoring women in the field of reproductive research, and also act as a mentor in the Biology Undergraduate and Master’s Mentorship Program (BUMMP) which focuses on increasing recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities in academia. One of my undergraduate students, Albert Nguyen, was awarded a BUMMP apprenticeship as well as a Summer URS Eureka! Research Scholarship for Biological Science majors to conduct research in my lab in 2022.

Research Philosophy

If the research we are conducting were easy to do, everyone would be doing it, or it would have already been done. We utilize the most novel techniques and models to remain on the cutting edge of research and answer important questions that have yet to be tackled in pregnancy disorders including preeclampsia, preterm birth, antiphospholipid syndrome, and intrauterine growth restriction.

Future Forecast for Pantham Lab

The lab is in the process of generating preliminary data to apply for R01 & R21 grants. A new Lab Assistant will work closely with Professor Laurent’s lab on workflows to sequence extracellular small and long RNA. We are setting up pilot projects to establish collaborations with OBGYN & RS Assistant Professors Kathleen Fisch and Lindsey Burnett.

Unlocking Pregnancy Disorders with Scientific Solutions

The placenta remains an incompletely understood and understudied organ. We now know that appropriate placentation is essential for a healthy pregnancy, and the concept of placental function playing a role in defining fetal health as well as later in life, or the “Developmental Origins of Health and Disease” is well established. As part of the UC San Diego Center for Perinatal Discovery, co-directed by Professors Laurent, Parast, and Mestan,  the Pantham lab is striving to raise awareness of the importance of understanding this organ as a key to unlocking pregnancy disorders in which the placenta plays a primary role. Visit the Pantham Lab to learn more.