Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

Eric Reiter of the Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE) in France will engineer nanobody-based biologicals to block ovulation as a practical, non-hormonal contraceptive with fewer side effects. Blocking the molecular regulators of ovulation is an attractive contraceptive mechanism. However, it can also affect steroid hormone production, which causes undesirable side-effects. Nanobodies are antigen-binding domains of antibodies that can very selectively modulate signal transduction pathways.

The project aims to solve the problem of a large number of low-weight births in the Indian population and the inability to predict the risk reliably in the antenatal period. The study plan goes beyond finding a single metric or rule aiming to describe the risk of Small-for-Gestational Age (SGA) in all women plan to use clustering with factor-selection on the various available data-sets. They will use algorithm development and in Bayesian modelling.

Datasets within the purview of HBGDKi with data on duration of breastfeeding, anthropometric measurements, and socio-demographic characteristics will be extracted, compiled and harmonized. WAZ, WHZ and HAZ scores will be calculated for each child. The study may describe the breastfeeding patterns in individual studies using a survival analysis approach and overall through a meta-analytic approach.

Combining multiple data sets from HBGDKi using ML tools for prediction, classification and topic discovery may yield new insights for adverse birth outcomes and intermediate outcomes of interest.

The study proposes on pregnant women (Garbh-ini) cohort, a multidimensional longitudinal dataset purposely designed to study preterm birth. The study will apply data-driven machine learning approaches to develop an accurate and clinically useful model to predict the risk of preterm births. It will use multiple models for classification, with better objective functions and misclassification penalties that will aid in a higher rate of accurate predictions, and resampling of the data to avert biases arising from class imbalance.

The study aims to calculate cut-offs using data provided by HBGDki and datasets with SAS, SJRI where weight, height, and age are available for children below five years in combination with other outcomes such as death, morbidity or hospitalization. Using WHO standards, weight for height, height for age and weight for age will be calculated, and these metrics will be used as determinants for risk of death, morbidity/hospitalization.

EVaccination app to ensure each newborn’s vaccination through trained semi-literate local people as incentivized Community Health Workers (CHWs) to find, counsel and accompany new mothers to public hospitals for vaccination

The proposed solution aims to develop an application for optical scanning of the Mother and Child Protection (MCP) card immunization record for use by frontline workers equipped with a mobile smartphone. Real-time point-of-service data entry will leapfrog the existing MCTS/ RCH approach based on data entry at the Primary Health Centre (PHC) to improve data accuracy, timeliness and completeness

Studies promoting egg consumption among women and children in lower middle-income countries (LMICs) show that growth indicators are significantly improved in children who consume eggs consistently. However, many states in India are chronically egg deficit, unable to fulfil their daily egg demand. The study is exploring the use of powdered-eggs in place of fresh eggs as they are cheaper and have a longer shelf life. Furthermore, the product is convenient to use, easy to transport, store and can be incorporated as an ingredient into Indian recipes and daily diets.

Neutrophil CD64 and procalcitonin present in the peripheral blood are the most promising biomarkers of neonatal early and late onstage sepsis. However, detection of biomarkers from other body fluids, such as urine, appears to be more feasible, considering the non-invasive sample collection and their accessibility from neonates. Additionally, the urinary biomarkers, which includes cytokines such as IL-8, IL-10 and MCP-1, are elevated during early presumed infection.