The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) is a partner in a new €13.6 million research centre which was launched in Cork earlier today. The Irish Centre for Fetal and Neonatal Translational Research (INFANT) will aim to improve treatment and care for pregnant mothers and newborn babies.

Based at Cork University Maternity Hospital, INFANT will receive €7.6m in public funding and a further €6m from 15 industry partners which will be used to directly support 60 researchers, doctors and scientists. They will work on addressing the significant absence of predictive and diagnostic tests in perinatal care by developing screening tests and methods of monitoring both pregnancy and newborn babies while attempting to identify the risks that can lead to pre-term births in an effort to enable early treatment and intervention. The centre's research will also focus on technologies to detect brain injury in newborns and better direct treatments.

Professor David Henshall, Department of Physiology and Medical Physics, RCSI, is a co-Principal Investigator of INFANT. The INFANT initiative will be co-directed Professor Louise Kenny and Professor Geraldine Boylan of UCC.

RCSI's partners in this centre are the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), University College Cork (UCC) and Cork University Maternity Hospital. For more information on INFANT, see www.infantcentre.ie.