Monash neonatologist awarded RACP fellowship for fetal treatment of congenital heart disease

Neonatologist Associate Professor Flora Wong has been awarded a competitive Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) Fellows Research Establishment Fellowship for her project “Maternal hyperoxygeneration - a potential new fetal treatment for hypoplastic left heart syndrome”.

The multi-disciplinery project, in collaboration with the obstetricians at Monash University and Monash Health, and paediatric cardiologists from the Paediatric Heart Centre at Giessen, Germany aims to develop new fetal treatment for congenital heart disease.

“We are interested in the hypoplastic left heart syndrome,” said Associate Professor Wong.

“Babies with hypoplastic left heart syndrome require very complex cardiac surgery shortly after birth with high mortality and morbidities in survivors.”

Over the last few years Associate Professor Wong and her team have developed a novel percutaneous fetal cardiac catheterisation technique, published in the fetal lamb model.

“The technique involves accessing the fetal heart via the fetal liver, by needle puncture through the maternal abdomen, under ultrasound guidance,” added Associate Professor Wong.

“Utilising this state-of-the-art cardiac catheterisation technique, we have recently created a fetal lamb model of hypoplastic left heart by closing the fetal foramen ovale.”

With her RACP Fellowship, Associate Professor Wong plans to confirm the cardiac pathology in the fetal lamb model of hypoplastic left heart.

“We will utilise this fetal lamb model to test if giving the mother (the pregnant ewes) supplementary oxygen during pregnancy would mitigate the development of the hypoplastic left heart in the fetal lamb.”

“This treatment of maternal hyperoxygenation (mothers breathing in supplementary oxygen for >4 hours per day) may be a practical and easy-to–apply fetal therapy to arrest/reduce progression of hypoplastic left heart in-utero.”