Preterm Birth

Preterm birth affects nearly 1 in 8 infants every year in the United States. Preterm babies are at significant risk for death or lifelong disability, including mental retardation, learning and behavioral problems, cerebral palsy, seizures, respiratory problems, gastrointestinal problems, and vision/hearing loss. Despite extensive efforts to reduce the frequency of preterm birth, little progress has been made and the rate of has increased by 36 percent since the early 1980s.

The Preterm Birth Prevention Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center is one of the only groups in the world that provides a truly multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to solving the problem of preterm birth. Our diverse group of dedicated individuals includes obstetricians specializing in preterm birth; physician-scientists and basic scientists from the Departments of Ob/Gyn, Anesthesiology, Pediatrics, Pathology, Radiology, and Dentistry; mental health specialists in the Departments of Ob/Gyn and Psychiatry; biomechanical engineers from the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science; and computational biologists from Columbia’s Department of Systems Biology. The goal of this multidisciplinary group is to unravel the complex pathophysiology of spontaneous preterm labor and premature cervical remodeling and use cutting edge research methods to develop novel interventions to prevent preterm birth.

Learn more about the Preterm Birth Prevention Center.

The Myers Soft Tissue Lab

A collaboration with the Columbia University Department of Mechanical Engineering—led by Principal Investigator Dr. Kristin Myers, The Myers Soft Tissue Lab studies the material behavior of biological soft tissues with a specific focus on the female reproductive system. The goal of this research is to uncover the structural antecedents of spontaneous preterm birth.

Notably, Dr. Myers has created a Digital Twin Modeling Platform for human pregnancy through NIH funding. A digital twin in biomedicine digitizes anatomy into a computer model to simulate and visualize how it physically functions. The digital twin models from Dr. Myers are particularly advanced because they include the nonlinear material behavior of the architected soft tissue of the uterus and cervix, which she has meticulously measured both in vivo and ex vivo in humans and across animal models. This digital twin platform has illuminated the biomechanical triggers for pregnant patients who deliver extremely preterm due to cervical insufficiency, a condition when the cervix prematurely opens with no uterine contractions. Her digital twin platform also fuels a growing women’s health biomedical device field. Her digital twin platform supports biomedical device design, optimization, and validation by providing an effective tool to de-risk invention and increase efficacy by enabling research and invention on the diversity of uteruses and cervixes. It also aims to avoid costly pre-clinical and clinical trials of unvetted devices, reduce the use of animal models, and provide validation and safety checks for new designs.

Dr. Myers’s work has been widely recognized by the NIH, NSF, National Academy of Engineers, and the White House’s Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE).

Preterm Birth

Faculty Active in This Area:

Columbia University Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology