Reproductive & Perinatal Health Translational Research Program

Strategic Pillars and Themes

The RPH program is structured around four integrated strategic pillars aligned with Sidra Medicine’s precision medicine mission:

1. Screening and Early Detection: The program applies a dual-screening strategy combining deep characterization of priority gold cohorts with clinically driven screening guided by unmet needs identified by treating physicians. This approach integrates deep phenotyping, multi-omics, and functional analyses to enable early prediction, disease monitoring, and treatment response, ensuring strong alignment between research priorities and clinical care.
2. Biorepositories and National Resources: The RPH biorepositories provide centralized, well-annotated, and ethically governed biological samples collected from mothers and their babies, across pregnancy and early life. A unified catalog of sample types, timepoints, and approved analyses enables efficient data sharing, collaboration, and high-quality translational research.
3. Advanced Diagnostics & Biomarkers Development: Using integrated multi-omics and machine learning approaches, the program identifies and validates biomarkers for early disease prediction and patient stratification.
4. Personalized Therapies: The program advances tailored therapeutic strategies across reproductive and perinatal conditions, including genomic-guided assisted reproductive technologies optimization, AI-enabled early clinical alerts for pregnancy complications, and targeted neonatal therapies for prematurity among others.

Gold Cohorts

The RPH Program is focused on three Gold Cohorts, each addressing a high-priority area of reproductive and perinatal health:

1. Infertility: This cohort focuses on unexplained and factor-specific infertility in individuals undergoing assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Integrated genomic, cellular, hormonal, and immune profiling is used to elucidate disease mechanisms and support personalized fertility treatment strategies.
2. Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: This cohort includes pregnant women with GDM followed prospectively during pregnancy and postpartum enabling deep multi-omics profiling across pregnancy aiming to identify early biomarkers of disease and inform predictive, data-driven prevention and management approaches.
3. Prematurity: This cohort investigates the biological pathways underlying preterm birth and determinants of neonatal outcomes through multi-omics analysis of maternal, placental, and neonatal samples, coupled with long-term developmental follow-up to support risk stratification and prevention.

Discovery and Invention

The RPH Translational Research Program focuses on hypothesis-driven and data-driven discoveries across key reproductive and perinatal conditions, leveraging advanced experimental platforms and computational approaches to accelerate innovation.

Specific Research Areas

• Reproductive disorders
• Pregnancy complications including GDM and preterm birth
• Maternal-fetal interface
• Early-life origins of disease, fetal programming and long-term child health outcomes

Experimental Approaches

• Multi-omics discovery: genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and microbiome profiling across maternal, placental, and neonatal samples.
• Deep phenotyping: integration of clinical, hormonal, metabolic, and immune data.
• Functional validation in vitro cellular assays, organoid systems, and transgenic animal models to establish causality.
• Computational biology & AI: machine learning and systems biology to identify biomarkers, disease subtypes, and predictive models.
• Translational innovation: progression of discoveries through a TRL-driven pipeline toward diagnostics, decision-support tools, and therapeutic strategies.

Therapeutic Innovation

The RPH Program aims to advance therapeutic innovation through pre-clinical and clinical trials designed to translate biological discoveries into improved maternal and neonatal outcomes.

Focus Areas

• Infertility: Biomarker and genomics-guided ART optimization, embryo selection strategies, and functional assays to improve implantation and live birth rates.
• Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Biomarker and AI-guided early intervention trials assessing personalized glycemic management strategies to prevent maternal and fetal complications.
• Prematurity & Neonatal Outcomes: Preventive and therapeutic trials focused on placental dysfunction, immune modulation, cord blood–based interventions, and targeted NICU therapies.

Collaborations

The RPH Translational Research Program is built on strong multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, collaborations to enable high-impact discovery, validation, and clinical translation.

Internal Collaborations include close partnerships with the women’s services department and clinics including Reproductive Medicine, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Maternal–Fetal Medicine, Neonatology and pediatrics.

External collaborations are actively developed with national and international academic institutions, clinical research networks, and industry partners in reproductive, women’s health and perinatal health. These partnerships support patients’ recruitment, sample collection, technology development while enhancing the program’s global visibility and translational impact.

Leadership team

Program Director:

• Souhaila Al Khodor, MS, PhD (salkhodor@sira.org)

Clinical and Research Leadership Team

• Hala Abdulahi, MD- Clinical co-Lead (habdullahi@sidra.org)
• Haytham Ali, MD- Committee Member (hali@sidra.org)
• Matteo Avella, PhD- Committee Member (MAvella@sidra.org)