Painful experience has taught Erika Moore that benign doesn’t always mean harmless. Moore, a biomedical engineer at the University of Maryland in College Park, lives with noncancerous tumors in the uterus called uterine fibroids. “That’s what drew me in to wanting to understand these diseases and try to make not only my life better, but the lives of my loved ones better too,” she says.
Uterine fibroids can cause anemia, pain, reproductive issues and heavy or irregular menstrual bleeding. An estimated 70 percent of white women and 80 percent of Black women in the United States will develop uterine fibroids by age 50. Moore is dedicated to finding the molecular underpinnings of fibroids and other diseases, such as lupus, that disproportionately affect women of color.
No one fully understands how and why fibroids grow. So, Moore and her team are using Jell-O-like materials called hydrogels to investigate the mechanism. Hydrogels mimic the 3-D properties of the uterine environment better than two-dimensional materials do. Soon, Moore and her team hope to add to the system the cells important for fibroid formation, such as muscle and immune cells.
Using such hydrogels, Moore says she hopes to “better understand, well, why did my fibroids form? Why did they form for other people?” Armed with that knowledge she may be able to devise new treatments for the condition.
