Cleft Palate In Fetal Mice Can Be Prevented
Mice engineered to have cleft palates can be rescued in utero by injecting the mothers with a small molecule to correct the defect, say scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. In addition to shedding light on the biology of cleft palate, the research raises hopes that it may one day be possible to prevent many types of human birth defects by using a similar vaccination-type technique in pregnant women likely to have affected fetuses.
