Every year, around 15 million babies worldwide are born before 37 weeks of gestation.
Being born preterm can disrupt development, and earlier births increase the risk of life-changing health outcomes.
There are currently no treatment options for brain injury that occurs because of preterm birth, but progress has been made thanks to the PREMSTEM project.
With support from the European Union and NHMRC, RMIT has partnered with international experts to investigate whether human mesenchymal stem cells (h-MSCs) could be the key to helping children affected by early-life brain injury.
New understanding of how stem cells work
Associate Professor Bobbi Fleiss from RMIT’s School of Health and Biomedical Sciences said that a primary goal of PREMSTEM was to uncover the answers to three key questions.
“We wanted to find out when we should give the stem cells, how to give them – via the nose or bloodstream – and how many were needed to have a positive effect on models of brain injury,” she said.
Using h-MSCs from donated umbilical cord tissue, one of the project’s early tasks was to test their effect in different models of brain injury, varying the timing and route of administration as well as the number of cells.
To manage this large amount of data, the team worked with bioinformaticians to create a scoring system to identify the most effective combination of timing, dose and administration route.
They saw that the most promising results came when delivering the stem cells via the nose and a short while after brain injury had occurred.
“Our comprehensive pre-clinical studies undertaken by multiple teams demonstrate that this type of stem cell can have a positive effect on brain damage in different models of perinatal brain injury,” Fleiss said.
“Excitingly we also saw them having a positive impact on other types of cells, helping the brain to repair itself after a traumatic event like preterm birth.”
Technologies to diagnose brain injury at the bedside
Another achievement of PREMSTEM has been to pioneer new brain imaging tools using ultrafast ultrasound that can be used to look into the brain at the bedside.
Researchers at Physics for Medicine Paris and industry partner, Iconeus, have developed diagnostic tools that look for blood vessel abnormalities in cases of brain injury.
“This exciting technology can help clinicians to better diagnose brain injury in children in a non-intrusive and comfortable way, keeping babies with their families even as we investigate their brains,” Fleiss said.
