6/11/2026 Amy Clay
Written by Amy Clay
Adrienne Antonson (she/her/hers), a professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, uses translational animal models to investigate inflammatory and neurodevelopmental origins of behavioral abnormalities and mental health disorders.
Research in the Antonson Developmental Neuroimmunology Laboratory focuses on exogenous and endogenous signals, deriving from prenatal maternal immune activation, that shift the function of fetal microglial cells and border-associated macrophages and subsequently disrupt neurodevelopment. Professor Antonson’s current work investigates whether immune- or microbial-derived signals induced by live respiratory influenza virus infection are capable of crossing the maternal-fetal interface during pregnancy, ultimately altering fetal brain development. Read more about the lab’s recent findings. Additional interests include selective permeability of placental and fetal brain vascular barriers and cellular and molecular immune interactions at the maternal-fetal interface (i.e., placenta).
Prof. Antonson joined the University of Illinois faculty in 2021. She has worked with IHSI Senior Research Development Manager Maggie Berg to develop past NIH R01 and R21 proposals and as a panelist for the NIH Grant Writing Series. The Antonson lab received their first NIH R01 award in Fall 2025 to further investigate transplacental immune pathways contributing to fetal brain pathology in maternal influenza.
Can you describe a goal you are currently pursuing?
Most of the work in my lab is centered around answering one major question: How does an immune insult during pregnancy (e.g., maternal viral infection) impact the developing fetus? We are particularly interested in understanding how the developing fetal brain may be “programmed” during this early critical window of development, setting the stage for lifelong poor mental health outcomes. To study this, we utilize preclinical animal models of respiratory influenza infection, which allow us to extract and examine fetal tissues at the cellular and molecular level across gestation. We also examine the behaviors of the animal offspring as they mature into adulthood, looking for correlates to human psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and autism. Our ultimate goal is to pinpoint specific immune, metabolic, and/or physiologic pathways that are shifted during infection so that we can develop and test antenatal therapeutics to protect the developing fetal brain.
How has the focus of your research changed or evolved since you first started in the field?
Surprisingly, the placenta has historically been underappreciated in my discipline, even though it is the primary interface between mother and fetus throughout gestation and is the major conduit for exchange of gases, nutrients, and all other molecules. It also has a very unique immunological role in establishing maternal tolerance, encouraging mom’s immune system to adapt to fetal/paternal antigens and carry the pregnancy to term (baby’s genome is only 50% similar to mom’s, and thus baby’s cells are recognized as “non-self”). There is an emerging subfield coined “neuroplacentology” that explores how the placenta may be directly regulating fetal brain development through modulation of endocrine, immune, and metabolic factors. In the past several years, my group has shifted our focus to exploring this forgotten organ and investigating how placental physiology and function may shift following maternal viral infection, contributing to the subsequent shifts we observe in fetal brain cells—neurons and resident macrophages.
How is most of your research funded? Can you share how your approach to seeking funding is changing in the current funding climate?
I was lucky enough to be supported by the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust through their Early Career grant program in the beginning stages of establishing my program. The Trust was my main supporter outside of my startup funds, and directly funded all the work that subsequently led to my successful National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01, awarded last year. Many of the proposals I submit are through NIH, although I have also submitted to DoD and USDA, along with other pregnancy-, neuroscience-, or cerebrovascular-focused private funders (like the Gates Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the American Heart Association).
In the current funding climate, I have to be flexible and diligent. NIH is constantly changing their requirements and calls, and the funding rates have plummeted. I am considering other private funders more, although this is also a strategy employed by many others, meaning that these funders are often overwhelmed by unprecedented increases in the number of applications they receive each cycle. It’s tough to be an academic researcher these days because we cannot predict or anticipate, which makes it especially difficult to support our trainees, let alone recruit. I know, as do my colleagues, that basic science is crucial for clinical advancement; this truth is bipartisan. Unfortunately, I fear we will continue to see persistent negative repercussions of this new restricted funding climate for years to come.
What is something you want your colleagues to know about you or your research?
At the moment, I exclusively conduct preclinical research, but I’d love to partner with researchers in the clinical space to obtain patient samples and/or work with patient data. I am naïve when it comes to working with human data, so I would need a collaborator(s) who is able to aid in study design, sample and data collection, and analysis. In particular, I’d love to obtain blood and amniotic fluid samples from pregnant women, along with placental biopsies, to find parallels between these samples and our preclinical animal samples. It would also be great to obtain scans of the placenta and developing fetal brain.
Are there new research areas that you are interested in pursuing in the next 3 - 5 years?
I have a very talented PhD student who is currently performing 3D whole organ optical clearing on our mouse placentas and fetal brains. This approach allows us to visualize the full vascular network and define specific shifts in vascular architecture following maternal infection. In the coming years, we hope to use these data to determine the extent to which vascular perfusion and permeability dynamics are shifted during infection, and how this contributes to adverse offspring outcomes. Through a collaboration with Dr. Wawrzyniec Dobrucki at Beckman, we have also administered a radioactive tracer in pregnant mouse dams to visualize live perfusion dynamics with PET/CT scanning. We’ve also considered high-resolution ultrasound to track perfusion dynamics at the placenta and fetal cerebrovasculature, but this will require acquisition of high-tech instrumentation. Outside of live or high-resolution imaging, we are also interested in pursuing a “placenta-on-a-chip” in vitro approach that would allow us to test targeted placental vascular and immune parameters at the cellular and molecular level. With a collaborator at Northwestern, I hope to obtain NIH R21 funding to use stable isotopes to trace maternally derived proteins across the placenta and into the fetal compartment, allowing us to build a full proteome atlas during gestation. These projects bring us to new horizons of transplacental cellular and molecular communication during healthy and inflamed pregnancies.
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