A consortium led by scientists at UCC has secured €6 million in research funding to find new ways of combating pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening complication of pregnancy.

Pre-eclampsia occurs when high blood pressure takes place in the second half of a pregnancy. It accounts for as many as 24% of maternal deaths in Europe each year and over 500,000 infant deaths annually worldwide.

According to UCC, the EU funding for the project will hopefully lead to the development of a readily available predictive test for pre-eclampsia, and this could revolutionise prenatal care.

The IMPROvED (IMproved PRegnancy Outcomes by Early Detection) project is coordinated by Professor Louise Kenny of UCC, who is also a principal investigator, and driven by two companies, Metabolomic Diagnostics Ltd of Ireland, and Pronota NV of Belgium.

The four-year IMPROvED project will set up a multicentre clinical study to assess and refine two new screening tests for pre-eclampsia. One of the two tests was developed at UCC and funded by the Health Research Board and Science Foundation Ireland.

According to Prof Kenny: "pre-eclampsia affects almost one in 20 first time mothers and globally causes approximately 70,000 maternal deaths each year. Our ultimate goal is to develop a robust predictive test for pre-eclampsia and to improve the outcome of pregnancy for both mothers and their babies."

The IMPROvED project will set up a pregnancy biobank with blood samples collected from 5,000 first-time pregnant women recruited from at least five countries including Ireland, the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.