Celebrating our final births

ORIGINS' last baby Isaac with Mum Leah

ORIGINS welcomes the project’s very last baby

The ORIGINS Project has celebrated the final baby being recruited into the longitudinal cohort study. There are now more than 19,800 individuals in ORIGINS - consisting of mothers, partners, children and siblings.

ORIGINS is now made up of 4,000 ‘active’ families providing samples and data to the project, and completing child health and development assessments from their child’s time in the womb, to the age of five. Almost 6,000 additional families are also part of the study, and have provided their consent for ORIGINS to access to their routinely collected medical information. This collection of data is contributing to a comprehensive Biobank and Databank that will be available for researchers from around the world to access for years to come.

“We are so excited to have reached this hugely significant time in The ORIGINS Project,” Professor Desiree Silva, Co-Director, said.

“We welcomed the very last baby into our study. The Biobank team processed their very last placenta, meaning we now have more than 2,200 placentas photographed with segments stored in our Biobank.”

“But the work continues to curate these precious resources that we have gathered and to continue to work with our wonderful ORIGINS families over the next five years to explore the impact of the early environment on child health and development and to possibly uncover some of the causes of chronic conditions.”

Thank you to our collaborators for working with us to reach this milestone: Joondalup Health Campus and Telethon Kids Institute. Thank you also to our funders without whom none of this would be possible: the Paul Ramsay Foundation and the Commonwealth Government through the Telethon Channel 7 Trust.

ORIGINS' Biobank Manager, Dr Nina D'Vaz, spoke to Ch 7 News about the significance of the milestone and the priorities for the project.

The Venditti family also spoke to Channel 7 News about their experience over their ORIGINS journey with first son Leo, and their joy at welcoming baby Luca, one of the last babies to be born into the study.

Watch the CH 7 News Broadcast here