Team’s Purpose

Our specific goals are to reduce the incidence of preterm birth, prevent preterm labour, to produce evidence for effective interventions, and to inform policy. This health issue and research is of special interest to people whom live in Alberta. The rate of preterm birth in Alberta is the highest in Canada, accounting for >9% of live births and 4000 newborns annually.

Our Unique Approach

In order to take in account the complex interactions that can contribute to preterm birth, which include biology and environment, our research will use a multidisciplinary agenda, from molecular biology to clinical research to epidemiology and population health. No other team like this has been assembled to address this problem. We are poised to have significant international impact and shape future research and policy development related to preterm birth.

Moreover, the team shares an interest in collaborative, cross-disciplinary work, with a mix of senior and junior researchers. We have come together to develop new ways of sharing information in order to ensure that knowledge exchange is both efficient and effective. Mentorship and training of students to build capacity for interdisciplinary research in the future is also a key goal.

We will also establish legacies for future studies, with repositories of medical data and biological samples. One of the key cohorts will involve pregnant women and their babies in a community-based study. Information gathered from questionnaires will be linked with biological information. Longitudinal follow-up studies will also be conducted on these women.

Our core resources will include:

  1. Data repository of integrated maternal, paternal and newborn health records to age 5;
  2. A tissue and biological sample bank;
  3. Development of a novel pregnant rodent research model at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neurobiology.

Expected outcomes of our integrated agenda include:

  • More accurate means of determining a woman’s genetic risk for preterm birth and assessing the potential influence of environmental factors on expression of this genetic risk
  • Improved methods of prenatal care and health service delivery that will minimize the occurrence of preterm birth and optimize health outcomes for the infant
  • Improved understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying preterm birth and their interactions with environmental factors such as stress, which will set the foundation for more effective intervention strategies both to prevent and delay preterm birth.
  • Parental education programs that will assist parents in caring for infants delivered prematurely and to optimize child developmental outcomes. These will also help minimize family stress.
  • New methodologies to provide accurate and comprehensive estimates of global financial costs of preterm birth
  • New discipline-specific researchers skilled at working both across disciplines and in teams