Umbilical Cord Blood Cell Transcriptional and Methylation Signatures at Birth Are Associated with BPD Development
Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is the most common respiratory disease in preterm infants born at less than 28 weeks gestation. Most existing clinical prediction models for BPD show limited accuracy in predicting BPD development when validated using external data, stressing the need for novel biomarkers to identify at-risk infants for early and effective interventions. We leveraged existing frozen umbilical cord blood samples from the Northwestern University Cord Blood Biobank (NUCord) to perform parallel transcriptional and DNA methylation profiling. BPD-associated differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in our cohort included markers previously established in clinical and animal BPD studies, such as genes related to NF-κB signaling and immune responses. We also identified that BPD development is associated with disrupted methylation signatures in microRNA genes and genes associated with glucose metabolism. Our results suggest that BPD development is associated with distinct transcriptomic and epigenetic signatures when compared with healthy term and preterm infants. These signatures may represent biomarkers measurable at birth that predict BPD development during a time window when preventative or therapeutic interventions could be applied.
Language: English
Subfield: Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Epigenetic modifiers of regulatory T cell function following viral pneumonia, FACSAria SORP Cell Sorter, Disordered Proteostasis as a Driver of Disease in the Aging Lung, Mechanisms of regulatory T cell-mediated recovery from severe viral pneumonia, The Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center, The Neu-Lung Consortium: Neutrophilic Mechanisms of Inflammation, Injury, and Repair in Lung and Airways Diseases, Mechanisms of Recovery from Viral Pneumonia
OpenAlex ID: W4415938454