It’s Sunday evening in Switzerland as I dial in a videoconference with Prof. Kristin Myers. She speaks from a room in a rental home where she and her family quarantine on their journey from New York to Detroit, where Kristin’s family lives. The coronavirus rages in New York and Columbia University with its 30’000 students is on lock-down. Her work has completely moved to Zoom, she is recording lectures at night “like a podcaster”, she says, and discusses questions with students during the day. While this would be an interesting topic in itself, we want to talk about a problem that will not go away anytime soon: preterm birth.

You are trained in mechanical engineering, a branch of science I associate more readily with buildings and bridges instead of anatomy and pregnancy. Why did you focus on these topics?
The proprieties of female anatomy during pregnancy are simply not well understood. There is a clear lack of data in the literature and a vacuum of innovation in this field. Biomechanics can contribute a lot to the understanding of this process. The underlying question is how biological developments affect the material properties of organs. The physician can see how the baby grows through ultrasound images, and we try to help them answer the simple question “when is the baby coming” by building predictive computer models. But for the models to be accurate, we need reliable data first, which includes data about the size and shape of the cervix, its softness or stiffness. Preterm birth is a widespread problem, with emotional ramifications, but from a technical perspective, it can also be seen as a case of material failure. In the same vein, as engineers can answer the question when a bridge will fail because its materials break, we now try to answer questions related to premature birth by applying very basic engineering analysis. There are, of course, also other approaches and branches of science involved, which study, for example, the genetic material in the blood of the mother.

You’re running a study at Columbia that makes use of Pregnolia’s measuring device. How far advanced is it?
We have almost finished one with 36 high-risk patients, half a dozen of doctoral students are now analyzing the data that was gathered. There is another study planned with 50 low-risk patients. At the moment, there are no studies ongoing at Columbia University Medical Center, of course, as all the medical staff is concentrated on coping with the COVID-19 crisis and the emergencies have priority.

What was your experience with Pregnolia’s device during the time of the study?
Even in normal times, Columbia University Medical Center is a very busy place and in the context of research, the doctors will be very reluctant to work with something they don’t see an immediate benefit in. With Pregnolia’s system and its demonstrated usefulness, it was quite easy, also because the measurement only takes a few minutes. The physicians understand the mechanisms of the tool, it pulls up a bit of tissue and measures how much pressure it has to exert. That closely mirrors the way they would assess the stiffness of the cervix with their hands. So I look forward to continuing with our studies as soon as the situation permits it.

How did you learn of this startup based in Switzerland?
When I studied biomechanics as a graduate student at MIT I already became aware of the work being done at the time at ETH. I was introduced to the founder Sabrina Badir later, when I already had my own lab, and was invited to sit on the Ph.D. committee when she defended her thesis. She is a fantastic engineer and on top of that, she is very strong at building a product that is easy to integrate into the workflow of the end-user. I don’t have any commercial involvement in her startup, but I think she came up with a fantastic tool and that’s why there has been a very good collaboration between Sabrina and me since then. I visited her offices in Zurich and she visited Columbia Medical Center during the study. She was very hands-on and grabbed every doctor she could get hold of!

How will this collaboration continue?
The goal of our lab is to publish a sort of computer design model of pregnancy, open-source so that anyone can access it. To build this we need to build a repository of data that takes many aspects into account, for example also race or the number of pregnancies a mother already had. This is why we would like to continue working with Pregnolia. We will publish the data from the first study I mentioned before the end of the year, but we also want to do a clinical trial later, and the Head of Research at Columbia would also like this project to move forward.