prenatal-screening
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The Pregnancy Test That Could Catch a Killer Before the Doctor Does
Preeclampsia kills tens of thousands of mothers a year, mostly because no one catches it in time. A team that started as classmates in Durham and Kampala wants to move that first warning from the hospital lab to the bathroom shelf.
MARAbio
MARAbio is a Salt Lake City precision-immunology company that built the first-ever blood test to identify Maternal Autoantibody Related Autism (MARA), a biological subtype of autism caused by a mother's own IgG autoantibodies crossing the placenta and binding fetal brain proteins. Founded on more than two decades of research by Dr. Judy Van de Water at the UC Davis MIND Institute, the company's MAR-Autism test screens mothers for specific autoantibody combinations linked to autism risk, and the company is now extending the science toward therapeutics that could neutralize those antibodies before they reach a developing brain.