Bird Pinkerton

Yeah.

Right now, it's just kind of deeply confusing.

Amy was saying she actually got interested in microchimera when she was studying breast cancer.

So she was sort of like reading through these papers.

which would suggest that there could be some kind of a connection again, or like a correlation, right?

Like more cells from the fetus, more cancer potentially.

So, again, there are a lot of questions here, right?

But if we can figure this stuff out, like, if we can figure out exactly the effects that microchimera have on our body in terms of cancer or also autoimmune diseases, like—

That could potentially be huge, right?

Amy was saying that maybe we could figure out if people are high risk for certain issues and help them early, for example.

Right now, because this is all such a mystery, like, we're still a very long way away from these kinds of applications, right?

Which I guess kind of just left me wondering why, right?

Like, why do we still have so many questions instead of answers here and know so little?

That is a good question.

Lee Nelson is actually one of the researchers that I mentioned before who first started diving into microchimera in the 1990s.

And she's been doing a lot of work for many decades on the autoimmune stuff specifically.

So I asked her essentially, like, why we are still so far from answers.

Reproductive health in general is very underfunded, but this work is also just very hard from a technical perspective.

The big challenge is very simple.

There are all these little chimerical cells that are very hard to track.