Patents in Oxidative Stress in Preeclampsia

Preeclampsia is a major cause of maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality and its prediction, diagnosis and management still remain to be challenging. However, recent technological advances in the understanding of its pathophysiology have identified many biomarkers to aid prediction of women at risk of developing preeclampsia (PE). Many etiological factors for PE have been evaluated as biochemical markers in the maternal blood for the prediction and diagnosis of PE such as markers for renal dysfunction, hemolysis, metabolic status, inflammatory markers oxidative stress, placenta-derived factors, and endothelial dysfunction. Pregnancy can be regarded a state of oxidative stress as a result of increased placental metabolic activity and antioxidant defenses. Evaluation of markers of oxidative stress and their molecular pathways may be useful in finding the possible solutions for this disease entity. This article aims to review various oxidative stress biomarkers in preeclampsia and gives an account of cellular responses to oxidative stress at transcript, protein and metabolite level and summarizes the available patents with special emphasis on redox genomics, metabolomics and proteomics applications in maternal-fetal medicine.