April 16, 2019
Congratulations to the ACTIVATE Study Team on the birth of the first baby accrued in this trial! ACTIVATE is a complicated study that involves coordination between the obstetrics and allergy departments at the two Mount Sinai clinical sites. Preparation for this trial has required extensive collaboration between the OB team, Jose Clemente’s lab, Cecilia Berin’s lab, and the allergy team to ensure the feasibility of all of the study’s day of delivery procedures and sample collections. Because of this complexity, the site staff did comprehensive day of delivery dry-runs in order to work out any issues in advance of the first birth. The report from the site was that the delivery visit for this first birth went well.
The site staff has worked very hard identifying potentially eligible pregnant mothers and approaching them about the trial. While this first birth was a vaginal delivery participant, there are four additional participants who are consented and in the screening process. The first C-section participant is scheduled for delivery at the end of April.
The goal of the ACTIVATE study is to investigate how differences in the microbiome of a baby may protect, or put a baby at risk for allergic problems. ACTIVATE is a pilot study of 120 pregnant women and their infants who are at higher risk for developing allergies to determine whether “vaginal seeding” (wiping a baby born by C-section with its mother’s vaginal fluids right after birth) will lower the risk of developing allergies at one year of age.
Congratulations to our ACTIVATE team members from ITN, NIAID, Rho, and PPD! Thank you for all your hard work that led to this success.
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