Epigenetics expert Hudson Santos, PhD, RN, FABMR, FAAN, is a big fan of the placenta. This wondrous organ can predict much about a baby’s future health, he explained during the 2024 Jane and Robert Cizik Lecture.

Santos discussed key findings from more than a decade of mother-child health research at the April 24 event. He is a professor, the Dean for Research Affairs, and the Dolores J. Chambreau Endowed Chair in Nursing at the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies. He also serves as president of the International Society of Nurses in Genetics.

He set the stage for his presentation, “Developmental Origins of Child Health: From Womb to Society,” by explaining how biological factors like genomics and biochemistry interact with social factors like interpersonal relationships and the sociopolitical climate.

“This is really a cascade of effects,” Santos said during the lecture at Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston. “You can’t look at each one of those factors in isolation to understand health and disease.”

Santos’ research primarily focuses on epigenetics, which involves the activation and deactivation of genes. Epigenetics plays a crucial role in regulating gene function. Maternal experiences and stressors can affect epigenetics in the womb, and the placenta “records” changes in the uterine environment, Santos believes.

“There are so many functions that the placenta is playing,” Santos said. “Molecular data from the placenta can be a predictor of health outcomes later in life.”

While at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Santo was involved with the Extremely Low Gestational Age Newborns (ELGAN) study, which tracked the development of children who had been born before 28 weeks of gestation.

In following up at age 10, the ELGAN team performed DNA tests on frozen placentas from more than 400 of the children’s births and compared the results with instances of health conditions such as asthma, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. They found that the data derived from the placental tests was a strong predictor of health issues.

Santos has built on this work with other researchers, including Arjun Bhattacharya, PhD, who is now an assistant professor in the department of epidemiology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and primary investigator of the Bhattacharya Lab for Computational Genomics. One study looked at how discrimination combined with acculturative stress can increase the risk of postpartum depression.

Santos currently holds several grants funded by the National Institutes of Health. He is the project leader for the Miami site of the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. Nationally, the program aims to recruit a cohort of more than 60,000 children and their parents to study demographics, genetic influences, and environmental factors that can affect early childhood health and development. UTHealth Houston is collaborating with Baylor College of Medicine on the ECHO program as well.

“If we are able to intervene during infancy, that helps prevent disease later in life,” Santos summarized.

The fourth annual lecture was made possible by an endowment from Jane Cizik and her late husband, Robert. The school was renamed in 2017 in honor of the Cizik family’s foundational $25 million gift, which also established endowments to support faculty research and student scholarships.