About INFANT

Across pregnancy, birth, infancy and childhood, the Irish Centre for Maternal and Child Health Research (INFANT) is solving challenges through its key research themes. The Centre is based at Cork University Hospital and is hosted by University College Cork. INFANT was founded in 2013 and is led by Professor Geraldine Boylan.

INFANT’s mission is to develop innovative technologies in perinatal healthcare, improving the treatment and care available to pregnant mothers and newborn babies worldwide.

Every day, around the world, 350,000 babies are born – that’s over 130 million worldwide every year. All will be shaped by the critical perinatal period, their time as a developing baby in the womb, by their birth and the first 28 days of life.

Our aim remains to meet the urgent demands for screening tests, diagnostics, therapeutics, enhanced nutrition and devices for early identification, diagnosis and effective treatment, which will ultimately lead to the prevention of perinatal complications and associated adverse outcomes. We also aim to ensure that next generation devices, diagnostics and therapies conceived, developed and tested within INFANT will have fundamental societal and economic impact.

INFANT was launched in 2013 INFANT with significant seed funding from the Irish Government via SFI and is now funded by a range of national and international funding agencies, industry partners and philanthropic donors.

Winning highly competitive international research awards and global partnerships with industry and academic researchers have enabled the Centre develop into an internationally renowned centre with over 100 staff, 12 Principal Investigators, over 20 associated Investigators, a dedicated paediatric clinical research unit, an international renowned biobank, a world leading data hub and other clinical research infrastructure in obstetrics and neonatology.

INFANT and its team of researchers have developed the world’s first early predictive screening test for pre-eclampsia, a seizure detection algorithm that uses machine learning to identify neonatal seizures and most recently its allergy research has been part of a breakthrough treatment for peanut allergy.