Tal Korem, PhD, Systems Biology and Obstetrics & Gynecology, will receive $3,404,285 over five years from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for "A large scale investigation of the vaginal metagenome and metabolome and their role in spontaneous preterm birth”.

 

This award will support the efforts of the Korem lab, along with Co-Investigators Dr. Anne-Catrin Uhlemann (Department of Medicine) and Dr. Ronald Wapner (Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology), to understand the role of the vaginal microbiome in preterm birth, the leading cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality. The investigators will generate a dataset of paired vaginal microbiome and metabolome measurements from samples collected along pregnancy in a large prospective cohort. Using this data, they will seek to identify new biomarkers for early identification of preterm birth and investigate the metabolic mechanisms that potentially underly it.