WILMINGTON, Delaware (April 29, 2026) — Elizabeth Wright-Jin, MD, PhD, has received a Career Development Award from the American Academy of Neurology to further her research on hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), the most common brain injury in babies.
Dr. Wright-Jin, a neonatal neurologist and an early-stage investigator at Nemours Children’s Health, Delaware Valley, has developed mouse models that have provided valuable insights into HIE. This is a condition that occurs when the brain does not get enough blood or oxygen, often due to a difficult birth. Dr. Wright-Jin will use her Career Development Award, which totals $450,000 over three years, to examine the role the mother’s immune cells may play in helping the baby’s brain heal from HIE.
“We know that the mom’s immune system has been exposed to many pathogens throughout her lifetime. That experience of her immune system allows her cells to react to subsequent ‘threats’ in more sophisticated ways than the newborn immune system, which is still immature,” Dr. Wright-Jin explained. “We hope that our research will identify mechanisms for treating damaging inflammation after brain injury, to ultimately reduce the extent of harm to brain cells in the newborns.”
Another crucial question is whether the maternal immune cells are transferred via umbilical cord blood or reside in a “reservoir” in the baby—perhaps in the bone marrow, the spleen, or circulating in blood.
Dr. Wright-Jin also aims to characterize the mother’s immune cells. She theorizes that there may be types of immune cells that are more “beneficial” to the healing process in infants and some that are more “detrimental.” Identifying these types may allow researchers to develop a tailored treatment approach to newborn brain injuries using a mother’s own cells, she explained.
“I suspect that we are going to learn that mom-baby interactions are dynamic and complex, but likely influential to the outcome of HIE,” she said.
HIE occurs in 1 to 3 out of every 1,000 births in the United States, and can result in developmental delays, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, or autism, and may lead to early death. The risk of HIE is higher if the mother has experienced an infection of the fetal membranes, or if the baby has experienced a perinatal event, such as a placental abruption or other medical emergency.
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