Carole R. Mendelson received a B.S. in Biology from The City College of New York, where her love for the biological sciences began. She went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Zoology from Rutgers University and was postdoctoral and Staff Fellows at The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. She joined the faculty of The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern) in Dallas in 1978, where she currently is Professor of Biochemistry and Obstetrics & Gynecology and Director of the North Texas March of Dimes Birth Defects Center. Dr. Mendelson’s scientific career is devoted to studying molecular mechanisms in developmental and hormonal regulation of key genes in perinatal biology and female reproduction.

 

 

 

 

"SIGNALING BETWEEN FETUS AND MOTHER IN THE TIMING OF BIRTH."

Abstract:  Preterm birth remains the major cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality throughout the world. This is due, in part, to our incomplete understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the maintenance of pregnancy and those that cause the initiation of term and preterm labor. There are two fundamental tenets regarding pregnancy and labor. The first, is that the steroid hormone progesterone, produced in large amounts throughout pregnancy, maintains quiescence of the uterine smooth muscle (myometrium), in part, by its anti-inflammatory actions. The second, is that labor is an inflammatory state caused by a loss in responsiveness to progesterone and by increased proinflammatory signaling between fetus and mother. In this lecture, I will describe our research that demonstrates a role of the fetus in the timing of birth. Specifically, I will focus on our studies indicating that maturation of the fetal lung and enhanced secretion of lung surfactant, a lipoprotein essential for air breathing, initiate a signaling cascade culminating in labor. Thus, we describe a novel pathway through which the fetus contributes to the initiation of labor by signaling the mother when its lungs have achieved sufficient maturity for survival outside the womb.

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