Rady grad student profile: Jaypee Aguilar investigates amniotic fluid’s effect on lung cells
In 2022, Jaypee Aguilar was working in a research role at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
The UM biochemistry grad enjoyed the job, but it wasn’t fulfilling his interest in biomedical science. When he saw a posting for a master’s student to work in a UM lab that studies chronic lung diseases, he knew the time was right to return to school.
The research project he’d be undertaking focused on how maternal smoking during pregnancy increases a baby’s chance of developing asthma. Aguilar himself had asthma as a child.
“This project is just really close to my heart,” he says.
Many published studies have shown that exposure to cigarette smoke in the womb increases a person’s risk of asthma and other inflammatory lung diseases.
“What no one knows is how that actually happens,” says Aguilar, 28, who was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Manitoba in his teens.
“How does the mom’s smoking get relayed to the developing child? That’s the knowledge gap.”
Some scientists have assumed that the communication pathway must be the umbilical cord, Aguilar says. “My research is novel because no one has looked at the amniotic fluid – the liquid that surrounds the baby inside the womb.
“We know that the developing fetus, for proper lung development, breathes amniotic fluid in and out. But there’s not a lot of knowledge of the normal chemical messengers that are present in amniotic fluid.”
Aguilar’s supervisor was Dr. Christopher Pascoe, associate professor of physiology and pathophysiology in the Max Rady College of Medicine and researcher with the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba.
Aguilar received funding of $20,000 from Research Manitoba. He has completed his master’s degree and is now a first-year UM medical student. We spoke with him about his master’s project.
What was involved in the study, and what were your findings?
To recruit the pregnant participants for the study, we piggybacked on a placenta study at the University of Alberta. Our collaborators there obtained samples of amniotic fluid from 32 participants at the time of giving birth. The participants were asked whether they had smoked during pregnancy.
Here in the lab, we tested the amniotic fluid for 99 different chemical messengers called cytokines, comparing the fluid from smokers and non-smokers. We found that the amniotic fluid from study participants who smoked contained a lot more cytokines that are associated with inflammation.
Since we can’t run tests on developing fetal lungs, we then exposed adult lung cells in the lab to the amniotic fluid to see if it affected their function. We measured the cells’ function by using an electric current.
We found that the amniotic fluid from participants who smoked actually increased the cells’ functioning in some ways. We think it’s because there are so many kinds of cytokines playing different roles in the fluid, and this needs more study.
The bottom line is, we have shown that amniotic fluid alters the function of lung cells. To my knowledge, we are the first in the world to demonstrate this. In both 2024 and 2025, I had the honour of presenting my research at the American Thoracic Society conference.
What made you decide to enrol in medical school?
A lot of my master’s courses were taught by clinician-scientists like Dr. Richard Keijzer (professor of surgery) and Dr. Shyamala Dakshinamurti (professor of pediatrics/child health and physiology). That came as the inspiration: I can do research and be a doctor as well.
I’m really interested in pediatric surgery. And long-term, I want to have my own lab. I want to have an intervention role in medicine, and also have a big research arm alongside that, and have both be complementary to each other.
What did you learn from your master’s studies that is helping you in medical school?
The problem-solving skill – being able to think through problems and solve them with the information you have, but also being able to look for information to solve your problems – that has helped me a lot.
Another thing you learn in grad school is resilience, because most of the time, your experiments will not work. Having that resilience to keep going is a big thing that I’m bringing to medical school.
This Q&A is part of a series on UM Today featuring Rady Faculty of Health Sciences graduate students. You can find more grad student profiles here: #Radygradstudents