Creating biobanks in low and middle-income countries to improve knowledge – The PREPARE initiative

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goal 5, a project signed in 2000, intended to improve maternal health and reduce maternal mortality by 75% by 2015. Despite all efforts, little progress has been achieved in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) and 99% of all maternal deaths related to pre-eclampsia (PE) still occur in these settings. It is important to determine whether women in LMIC, where PE carries a greater risk than in high-income countries (HIC), have unique risk factors. Some variances may alter the risk, severity and pertinent pathophysiology of PE. We posit based upon this, that women from LMIC may have biomarkers specific to this population. Discovering such specific biomarkers and testing the relevance of biomarkers developed in high-income populations could increase the clinical usefulness of these analyses without increasing cost-effective approaches for prediction of PE. Here we briefly describe our platform to develop the PREPARE – Biobank in tertiary hospitals or basic units for antenatal care from 6 different cities in Brazil. The PREPARE – Biobank has been developed with two arms. The first arm is a cross-sectional study that will collect clinical information and biosamples from more than 1000 women who developed preterm PE. The second arm is a cohort study of 7000 women. It will collect clinical information and longitudinal biosamples from women at three times during pregnancy, <16 weeks, between 28 and 32 weeks and at delivery or diagnosis of adverse outcomes. The biobank will be supported and complemented by a Brazilian database using the CoLab COLLECT Database.