by April White

The need for such work is obvious: In 2020, a woman died every two minutes from preventable pregnancy-related causes, according to the World Health Organization. The risk to mothers has long been highest in sub-Saharan Africa, but in recent years, North America and Europe have seen an increasing number of deaths among pregnant people and those who have recently given birth. In the United States, the maternal mortality rate nearly doubled between 2014 and 2021, with the biggest increase in risk among Black women.

“We’ve gone backwards in the last two decades, and that’s staggering,” says Jain, a serial biotech entrepreneur. Part of the problem is that maternal health has been historically understudied—but there is a ready remedy: Jain believes that many of the same scientific advancements in genomics and machine learning that have, for instance, led to earlier cancer diagnoses, can also be used to identify pregnancy complications months before dangerous symptoms arise. Pregnancy doesn’t have to be a “black box,” he says, and in 2018 he cofounded Mirvie, a startup developing RNA analysis tools, to prove it.

This isn’t what Jain thought he would be doing when he was studying at Caltech in the late 1980s. After a freshman year Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship project, he planned to pursue a career in laser physics. But while he enjoyed the work, “I was a few decades too late,” he says. Laser physics research had been pioneered in the 1960s; Jain wanted to be a part of a groundbreaking moment like that. “I got quite curious about what field might be approaching that frontier stage, entering a ‘golden decade’ where all the advances are so new that you are really pushing the field forward rapidly,” Jain recalls. In the mid-1990s, that curiosity led him to the Human Genome Project—an international effort to map human DNA. Such knowledge, Jain believed, would provide the launching pad for scientific discovery in the 21st century.

Jain had also expected to spend his career in the lab, but as industry began to join academia in advancing the field of genomics, Jain saw an advantage in entrepreneurship: “I got to see just how fast industry can move in making a product that can impact lives.”

Jain believes that many of the same scientific advancements in genomics and machine learning that have, for instance, led to earlier cancer diagnoses, can also be used to identify pregnancy complications months before dangerous symptoms arise.

“But the biological basis for preeclampsia starts quite early, about the end of the first trimester or early in the second trimester,” Jain explains. Early research has shown Mirvie’s RNA analysis can detect preeclampsia months in advance of the emergence of symptoms in 75 percent of cases. Mirvie recently completed a larger 10,000-plus-person study in the United States, with plans to publish its results later in 2024, and a study of preeclampsia in sub-Saharan Africa is currently underway.

If pregnancy complications like preeclampsia can be diagnosed earlier, they can be treated earlier, hopefully with improved outcomes, Jain says. “We definitely don’t have all the treatments [in maternal health] that we do in oncology. We know that pregnancy health is probably two to three decades behind fields like oncology, but hopefully we can leapfrog and catch up pretty quickly.”

Jain is hopeful we are at the dawn of a third golden decade for genomics, a decade that will change lives for generations. “People still largely think of pregnancy as what happens in nine months or 40 weeks,” he says. But for mother and baby, “what happens in those weeks actually makes a lifetime impact.”