Global AI Project Gets $46M To Personalize Care For Moms And Babies

King’s College London has received a $46 million donation to improve maternal, child, and lifelong health through personalized human and AI-driven interventions. Inkfish, a philanthropic research organization, donated the funds, the largest donation by a single donor in the university’s history.

The Enhanced Maternal and Baby Results with AI-supported Care and Empowerment (EMBRACE) program of studies will support a diverse cohorot of women and their families from pregnancy to the child’s second birthday.

EMBRACE aims to lower healthcare costs related to pregnancy by creating an “unprecedented resource” of physiological, psychological, and digital data. This will enable the rapid development of AI-powered models and interventions to personalize pregnancy and early childhood care.

Addressing major challenges during pregnancy

EMBRACE aims to tackle the significant challenges posed by conditions like gestational diabetes, pregnancy hypertension, and perinatal depression. Current research highlights that physical activity can reduce these risks by up to 40%, but prevention research is often underfunded and is far behind disease treatment research.

EMBRACE will consist of two multidisciplinary components led by King’s. The first will be the world’s most extensive digital record of the genetic makeup of a birth cohort. It will include 60,000 pregnant women, their partners, and babies from the UK, Spain, Peru, Ghana, China, and Canada.

Data will be collected from different sources, and an AI assistant will be used to develop this data to highlight complex factors impacting the health of pregnant women.

Researchers will then use this data to launch a clinical trial in the UK to test a new blended ‘human-AI health assistant’. This assistant will adjust to each individual and aim to support them through pregnancy and the first two years of the child’s life.

Prioritizing diversity and equity

EMBRACE will have the world’s largest digital cohort of pregnant women and their families with 60,000 people from diverse regions around the world taking part.

“This remarkable donation provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to conduct a truly diverse international study, offering insights from multicultural and multi-ethnic populations worldwide,” Dr Argyro Syngelaki, a Reader in Maternal-Fetal Medicine at King’s and part of the EMBRACE research team, said.

“Research participant diversity is not just a matter of equity; it is a scientific imperative,” Professor Graham Lord, Senior Vice-President, Health & Life Sciences, at King’s College London, added. “By including people from different walks of life around the world in this study, we can better understand health inequalities, improve the quality of findings and make sure data truly represents the populations we aim to serve.”

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