Published on 1 October 2021
Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s at Sunshine Hospital is playing a key role in a once-in-a-lifetime study that could ultimately improve the health and wellbeing of all Victorians.
The innovative Generation Victoria (GenV) project, led by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI), is one of the world’s largest-ever cohort studies.
It will follow babies and their parents to ensure health challenges ranging from asthma, food allergies and mental illness, can be better predicted and treated.
Over two years, approximately 150,000 children born in Victoria and their parents will be invited to join the study.
And it all started at Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s (JKWC) in December 2020, with the official launch of the program and the commencement of recruitment.
As of July 2021, the GenV team has recruited 1111 families and 2427 participants at Joan Kirner
Women’s and Children’s alone.
Meanwhile, the program is being steadily rolled out to all maternity hospitals across Victoria.
GenV’s primary objective is to create large, parallel whole-of-state birth and parent cohorts for discovery and interventional research.
It will enable scientists to explore the issues affecting Victoria’s children and their families with greater speed and precision than we can today, allowing them to explore the critical links between environmental exposures, genome (genetics), physical characteristics and later outcomes across the life course.
Western Health Associate Professor Joanne Said, Head of Maternal Fetal Medicine at Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s, member of the GenV Investigator Committee and the Chair of the GenV Pregnancy Working Group said the vast amounts of information collected would help identify trends
across the population, including those detected in pregnancy.
“Many childhood conditions actually have their origins in pregnancy,” explained A/Prof Said.
“By understanding the impacts of the pregnancy on those childhood conditions, we will have the opportunity to understand more about the effects of pregnancy and predict which interventions will actually make a difference for those children.”
GenV Director Professor Melissa Wake thanked the Western Health team for collaborating in such a significant study.
“GenV brings a size and a scale to research for children and parents that we simply haven’t seen before in Australia, or really anywhere else in the world,” Prof Wake said.
“The more people who take part, the clearer the picture becomes, making it easier to predict, prevent and treat the problems that children and parents face every day.”
Western Health’s Research Program Director Bill Karanatsios said: “With both myself and Jo being involved very early on in a number of GenV working groups, it was natural progression that JKWC became the vanguard site for GenV to help test the various operational elements of the program and introduce further refinements before its state-wide roll out.
“The high birth rate numbers at JKWC coupled with the diverse
populations it serves provided a great opportunity for the program to be tested in the ‘real world’ and such partnerships demonstrate how important they are for helping address current and future health challenges.”
GenV is led by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, supported by the Royal Children’s Hospital and University of Melbourne, and is funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation, the Victorian Government and the Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation.
