Nonprofit organization March of Dimes has reportedly opened a new PRC (Prematurity Research Center) at UCSF (UC San Francisco).

This new PRC will focus on sharing prematurity data, electronic medical record research, and computational drug discovery. It is part of the organization’s transition to fast-track the discovery to limit preterm birth rates in the United States.

March of Dimes has appointed Dr. Emre Seli as the Chief Scientific Officer, who will be responsible for helming the vast research portfolio of the organization.

Preterm birth is a huge problem that affects all demographics in the U.S. and affects one in ten babies born every year. Despite modern scientific advancements, preterm birth is a mysterious concept for the medical community.

The new PRC at UCSF will commit to solving the challenges associated with preterm birth as well as providing actionable solutions for the medical community.

Dr. Emre Seli has pointed out that the organization has invested in several research avenues to consolidate different levels of experience, intellect, and technology to solve the issue of preterm birth.

The UCSF PRC is included in the March of Dimes global network, with other locations at the University of Pennsylvania; Imperial College, London; University of Chicago-Northwestern-Duke; Stanford University; and the Ohio Collaborative (Case Western Reserve University, Vanderbilt University, and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center). Every center provides its expertise to explore various research themes.

The new PRC will target three goals:

• Expansion of data sharing
• Repurposing computational drugs
• Leveraging EMR (Electronic Medical Records)

Dr. Marina Sirota, Associate Professor at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, will lead the center. As a well-known computational scientist for women’s health, she has also developed a training program for minority high school students in the fields of big data and AI.

The UCSF PRC opens at a right time for the PRC research of the nonprofit organization. PRC investigators have issued three remarkable studies in the Nature family of journals over the last five months.

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