Study of Late-foetal Human Organ Development

Knowledge about abnormal organ development is important to understand pathology and to develop novel treatment approaches for individuals with congenital and acquired disease. Most of our current understanding is based on examination of tissues from the embryo and early fetus, collected from women undergoing termination of pregnancy in the first trimester (third) of pregnancy. There is very little known about normal and abnormal organ development from a developmental perspective during the crucial last two-thirds of pregnancy when much remodelling of fetal tissues occurs. We aim to collect tissue from a variety of developing fetal organs in the last two-thirds of pregnancy from women who decide to undergo a termination of pregnancy and who wish to undergo a clinical fetal postmortem (PM) examination.