Lombardia: Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to Combat Premature Births
In Lombardy, over 4,280 premature births (before the 37th week) were recorded in 2022. Worldwide, premature birth is the leading cause of death for children under five years old, with approximately 900,000 neonatal deaths reported each year. While the causes of premature birth are still not clear, it is suspected that the environment may be one of the main triggering factors. To address this issue, the research project TinyTrend, led by Albert Navarro Gallinad, health data scientist at the Human Technopole and member of Luisa Zuccolo’s research group, will study which environmental factors contribute to premature births in order to inform future prevention policies.
“TinyTrend” is one of two projects for which Human Technopole has been awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions postdoctoral fellowship (MSCA) from the European Commission. The other project is called Prune and is developed by scientist Carlos Jimènez, a postdoctoral researcher in Magda Bienko’s team. Prune will study the spatial arrangement of proteins within the cell nucleus and how this contributes to optimizing cell function. Each fellowship is worth over €172,000 and will last for two years.
Thanks to an ongoing collaboration with the Lombardy Region, Albert Navarro Gallinad will have access to health data on births recorded in Lombardy over the past twelve years, estimated to be nearly one million children. These data will be cross-referenced, using AI, with other sets of information related to changes in risk reduction policies that have occurred over the years. For example, the project will investigate how the frequency of premature births changes following the introduction of traffic reduction policies. This will allow for connecting the dots between air pollution and the risk for pregnant women, using policy changes as a natural experiment. This innovative approach will help identify additional environmental causes related to premature births.
TinyTrend will therefore serve as a best practice for other Italian regions, generating knowledge that can also be transferred to the study of other diseases with a strong environmental component and uncertain causes. The project also includes the development of a website that will feature an educational space where the research results will be presented and available in Italian, English, and Spanish, reaching women from different backgrounds. The website will also adhere to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s, and Adolescents’ Health.
Carlos Jimènez’s project, “PRUNE,” focuses on the fact that the cell nucleus is not homogeneous. Most of its components are not evenly distributed but assume a peculiar three-dimensional arrangement that physically separates processes that would otherwise be incompatible and optimizes the allocation of functions. For this reason, researchers believe that proteins, the main executors of biological functions, should have a specific spatial distribution within the cell nucleus, which significantly influences vital cell processes. To test this hypothesis, Carlos Jimènez will develop a new method to identify and map the three-dimensional arrangement of all proteins in the nucleus across different types of cells, from stem cells to genetically modified cells, and their associated functions. In addition to adding to the basic knowledge of the cell, these findings could provide tools for identifying new therapeutic targets for treating certain diseases in the future.
Marino Zerial, director of Human Technopole, emphasizes: “These prestigious fellowships obtained by our researchers confirm the need and importance of investing in young people, especially in the scientific field. They further demonstrate Human Technopole’s commitment to improving people’s health and its role in educating the next generation of scientists. Albert Navarro Gallinad and Carlos Jimènez’s studies will combine big data with artificial intelligence and three-dimensional mapping technologies of the human genome.”
