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Join with us to improve maternal and infant health

We need your help! The Pregnancy Research and Translation Ecosystem (PRT-E) is a unique initiative built on a partnership with the community – it is an exercise in people power meets cutting edge science to drive improvements in the health of women and their children, by making practical changes to the way women experience pregnancy care. Partnering with the philanthropic community to accelerate the impact of PRT-E on health outcomes is crucial.

We know that health and wellbeing during pregnancy has a huge impact on the health and wellbeing of our community. For women, it is important to minimise the risk of complications such as gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and mental health challenges, all of which influence health in both the short and long term. For their babies, the first 1000 days of life following conception are pivotal to reducing the risk of common and important problems in including allergic disease, asthma, learning difficulties and autism spectrum disorder.

Optimising women’s diet, physical activity, mental health, and avoidance of harmful exposures, such as environmental pollutants, is paramount. So too is building a pregnancy care system that can respond and adapt to evaluation and improve accordingly.

Our research is leading the way, internationally, in developing new strategies targeting pregnancy. Projects such as the Barwon Infant Study enable us to discover targets for new prevention strategies – ranging from the impact of inflammation on perinatal depression and infant learning outcomes, to the role of gut bacteria in the prevention of preeclampsia and allergic disease.

PRT-E creates an environment where we can work with families and health service providers to co-design and translate strategies building on these discoveries. Examples of this include the Bugs and Bumps trial, which will test a novel intervention to support women to optimise their diet during pregnancy, and our work to develop a new generation of probiotics to support maternal and infant health outcomes.

If you share our passion for optimising women’s health and providing children with a healthy start to life, please consider joining us in our mission!

If you’d like to connect and to learn more about how your donation could support our transformational plans for the future, reach out using the form below.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Professor Pete Vuillermin