Young fetuses, before red blood cells and blood vessels are formed, need to depend on small amounts of oxygen diffused from their mother’s red blood cells to grow their bodies, and were thought to be in a severe hypoxic state.
Professor Norio Suzuki (School of Medicine and NICHe) discovered that the hormone erythropoietin, which increases red blood cells, is secreted by cells in the nervous system during the fetal period.
Using human and mouse cells, we found that young developing fetuses are in a state of hypoxia due to the absence of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, and that this hypoxia stimulates erythropoietin secretion by keeping nervous system cells in an immature state. When erythropoietin causes an increase in red blood cells and the hypoxic state is resolved, the nervous system cells stop secreting erythropoietin and mature. This discovery demonstrated the paradoxical phenomenon that hypoxia, once considered harmful, can be utilized for fetal growth.
The results were published in Molecular and Cellular Biology on Desenber 2, 2024.
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