Tags: sprinkles, sickkids, sick kids, saving lives at birth, people's choice awards, pregnant women, rural, developing countries, prenatal, calcium, folic acid |
Categories: Research, SickKids News
Posted by
Janice Nicholson on
7/22/2011 4:31 PM |
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A team of our SickKids scientists submitted a proposal for an international grant competition, Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development. This competition is seeking innovative approaches for improving maternal and neonatal survival in rural regions of low-income countries. The team from SickKids are now finalists in the competition and are also up for a People’s Choice Award for the best submission to the challenge – and YOU can help them win the People’s Choice Award!
Seventy-seven finalists out of more than 600 applications have been selected to compete in the final stage of this program. Team SickKids is made up of Drs. Daniel Roth, Stan Zlotkin, Ashley Aimone and Diego Bassani of SickKids and collaborators from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baylor College of Medicine, and ICDDR,B (Bangladesh).
The project entitled, Prenatal calcium to prevent preeclampsia and preterm birth in resource-poor rural settings, is particularly innovative because they are suggesting that calcium and iron can be safely and feasibly provided together for the first time. The team proposes to develop a novel once-daily microencapsulated micronutrient powder containing iron, folic acid, and calcium (Prenatal Sprinkles) to overcome barriers to the integration of calcium into prenatal care in developing countries. If successful, their innovation – “differential time-release microencapsulation” – will mask the taste of iron and the gritty tongue-feel of calcium, and facilitate differential iron and calcium absorption.
Should the SickKids team be successful in being awarded this grant, they anticipate that Prenatal Sprinkles will be an effective means to supply supplemental calcium (and iron-folic acid) to pregnant women in rural settings, without causing adverse effects on iron absorption.
While there is still a huge process the team has to go through to receive this grant, you can help by registering and voting for them in the People’s Choice Award. This will be presented at the Saving Lives at Birth DevelopmentXChange July 27-28, 2011 in Washington, DC.
Register an account today, and vote for your colleagues. Voting is open now until July 27 at 5 p.m. Visit the Saving Lives at Birth website, register and vote!