Professor awarded Grand Challenges Exploration grant

The Liggins Institute has announced that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Philip N Baker, Director of Gravida - National Centre for Growth and Development and Professor of Maternal and Fetal Health at the Institute will pursue an innovative global health and development research project, titled “Prediction of fetal neurodevelopmental outcome through the maternal hair metabolome”.

Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges.  Professor Baker’s project is one of more than 60 Grand Challenges Explorations grants announced today by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

To receive funding, Professor Baker and other Grand Challenges Explorations winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of five critical global heath and development topic areas.  

Professor Baker proposed a wholly innovative approach to identifying, before birth, infants likely to have impaired brain development that would only become apparent later in childhood. It is based on identifying specific patterns of chemicals in their mother’s hair during pregnancy that are characteristic of aberrant neurodevelopment.

Professor Baker says that, to date, the dynamic composition of complex biological fluids such as blood has limited discovery of robust biomarkers/predictors of future health. “Hair grows relatively slowly, providing a stable, average profile of natural and environmental chemicals that have been incorporated from blood over several months,” he said.

“Importantly, hair collection is non-invasive, applicable across different populations and low-resource settings; samples require no processing before analysis and may be stored at room temperature.”

In collaboration with researchers in Singapore, Malawi and China*, the Gravida team will analyse metabolite profiles in hair samples taken during pregnancy from mothers of children whose neurodevelopment has been assessed at two years of age, to identify patterns associated  with adverse outcomes. They will use these to predict poor outcomes in the two African and Asian populations and identify at-risk babies who need special care early in life to minimize later problems.

About Grand Challenges Explorations

Grand Challenges Explorations is a US$100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Launched in 2008, over 1070 projects in more than 60 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants.  The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization.  The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online applications and no preliminary data required.  Initial grants of US$100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to US$1 million.

Gravida: National Centre for Growth and Development is a Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) funded by the New Zealand Government and hosted by the University of Auckland. Gravida brings together leading biomedical, clinical and animal scientists from across New Zealand and around the world.

Our internationally recognised research seeks to reveal how conditions encountered in early life affect the way an individual grows and develops throughout life. Our aim is to advance the understanding of the underlying processes involved in these changes both in human health and agricultural contexts with a view to identifying their short- and long-term consequences for health and disease.

We actively support the application of our findings in the clinical, agricultural, public policy and education sectors, to help bring economic and social benefits to all New Zealanders.

* Collaborators in this project are:

Patrick D Mangochi, Parent and Child Health Initiative, Lilongwe, Malawi

Anne Rifkin-Graboi, Singapore Institute of Clinical Sciences, Singapore

Chao Tong, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Chongqing Medical University, China

Media coverage

New Zealand Herald 07 November 2014

TVNZ ONE News 07 November 2014