It was in the fall of 2024 that Abigail Hendricks learned she was pregnant with her fifth child. She was glowing with excitement.

“For me, a baby is a blessing,” Hendrix says. “It’s cute. It’s precious. And it’s a gift from God.”

But Hendricks, then 33 and living in Cape Town, South Africa, would later learn that her growing baby also posed a serious health risk to her. Hendrix already had high blood pressure. The headache started immediately. Sometimes her vision would become blurry. Then proteins began to appear in the urine.

“I kept fighting,” she recalls. “I went to church. I pray in the morning. I pray at night that the baby and I are safe.”

The doctor gave her another blood pressure medication and told her to rest. By this time, all of Hendrix’s bookings had been transferred to Tygerberg Hospital, a Cape Town facility equipped to handle more complex cases.

However, a month before her due date, she started losing control of her blood pressure. Normal readings are 80-120, but her readings rose to 101-163.

Hendrix had developed pre-eclampsia, a potentially fatal pregnancy complication that involves damage to blood vessels and loss of large amounts of fluid. It can cause dangerous swelling and heavy bleeding of the lungs, brain, and heart.

“I was told that my blood pressure was too high and that I could have a seizure,” she says. “I was scared and anxious. What was going to happen?” (Eclampsia refers to seizures that occur in pregnant women with pre-eclampsia.)

The medical team believed that Ms. Hendricks’ life was in danger and that her baby was also at risk.

An uneasy beginning

One recent morning, Kathy Clover Glide through Tygerberg Hospital’s bustling maternity ward. A supply cart moves down the hallway. Nurses and doctors move between many patients. The sound of a newborn baby echoes in the air. Kluver, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at nearby Stellenbosch University, has been searching for a cure for pre-eclampsia for 10 years.

“We do about 8 to 9,000 births a year here to high-risk women alone,” Kluber explains. This includes women with pre-eclampsia who are doing their best to delay delivery. It is important that the baby stays in the womb as long as possible, but this can put the mother’s health at risk.

Kluber points to the room where the mother with pre-eclampsia is. “I can see they’re not doing very well,” she says. “Her feet are swollen, her feet are swollen, her hands are swollen. These mothers are risking their lives for their babies.”

Preeclampsia occurs when the placenta emits a type of molecular distress signal that it’s not getting enough oxygen. “We’re saying, ‘Let’s raise our blood pressure because we need more blood supply,'” said Kluver, who herself had pre-eclampsia when she was pregnant with her first child.

Conventional medications to treat high blood pressure are dangerous because even though they may lower the mother’s blood pressure, they can also reduce blood flow to the baby when the placenta is demanding more oxygen.

“This is really one of the most serious complications of pregnancy,” Dr. Clover says, making it one of the leading causes of pregnancy. maternal mortality rate All over the world — at least Number of maternal deaths: 42,000 Every year.

Clover has been searching for treatments to lower blood pressure and repair damaged blood vessels to help both mothers and babies. Then, about two years ago, I received an email from her. Dia Medica Therapeuticsa US-based pharmaceutical company.

They were testing a drug for a specific type of stroke called DM199, which worked in a way that appeared to be effective against pre-eclampsia as well. Clover was skeptical at first, but after looking into it more, she and her colleagues decided it might be worth a try. “It has the potential to work because it meets everything we want,” she says.

So they began a trial at the hospital, targeting mothers with dangerously high blood pressure who were due to give birth prematurely.

“I was very nervous the first day,” Clover said. “I started an IV, but I have no idea what’s going to happen.”

The researchers enrolled small groups of women and gave each group a slightly higher dose of the drug. Fifteen patients were hospitalized, but there was no sign that it was working.

“I thought, ‘This drug is not real,'” says Jackie Teke, a research nurse at Stellenbosch University who is overseeing the trial. “There was actually no difference in blood pressure. Maybe a little difference here and there, but not a huge difference.”

lucky number 16

But when the 16th patient received the next higher dose, “we literally just started this infusion and her blood pressure stabilized,” Kluber recalls. “When we saw her blood pressure, which had been abnormally high, suddenly drop, we thought, ‘This is unbelievable. It’s impossible!'”

“That’s actually when the real excitement started,” Teke says. “Like jumping up and down. [sent] Hundreds of millions of emojis celebrating lower blood pressure. ”

And it stayed down. The same applies to subsequent patients receiving the same dose or stepwise increasing doses.

“This drug stabilizes the lining of the blood vessels, making them happier,” Kluber says.

Tests have shown that the drug does not seem to penetrate the placenta or breast milk either, meaning it is unlikely to reach the baby.

Kluber and her colleagues hope this may be the first drug treatment for preeclampsia.

“It means a healthy mother and a healthy baby,” says Theke, who describes what it’s like to lose a mother or a child. “It would mean fewer broken homes and perhaps a better life for young children growing up. That’s what it means to me: mothers and children growing up in love.”

Still, she says there’s still more to learn about how the drug works and whether it can keep mothers pregnant longer.

Corneira Graves teeth The medical director of the Tennessee Maternal-Fetal Medicine Facility says up to 10 percent of pregnant women have preeclampsia.

“This is a small study with great promise, but we need a larger data set on a broader population,” said Graves, who was not involved in the trial.

“But what’s really promising about this particular study is that it also increases placental blood flow,” she added. This means the new drug lowers the mother’s blood pressure while improving blood flow to the uterus when the baby needs it.

Kara RudePhysician in Maternal Fetal Medicine at Ohio State University, who did not contribute to the trial, said he similarly felt encouraged by the early results. But she wants to know how the drug affects women in the early stages of pregnancy, rather than in emergencies just before childbirth.

“I think the real test is whether this drug can safely prolong pregnancy, reduce risks, and ultimately improve neonatal outcomes,” Dr. Ruud says.

As for Abigail Hendricks, she was patient number 24 in the trial at Tygerberg Hospital. Her son is almost 9 months old. “Hayden is a sweet kid. He’s very playful.”

Last year, when her blood pressure continued to rise in the weeks before her due date, she enrolled in a trial and was given a new drug just before her medical team guided her. Hendrix’s blood pressure slowly dropped.

Then, she says, “he was handed over screaming.” “When I held my baby for the first time, I cried. I was so happy in my heart to know that my baby was okay. And I was okay, too.”

This article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.