Targeting preterm brain injury

Sweden has long been among the frontrunners in neonatal care and currently has one of the highest survival rates in the world for extremely premature babies who are born before 28 weeks of gestation.

Intracerebral hemorrhage and white matter injury are the two major types of brain injury in preterm infants, and these can lead to long-term adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, including cerebral palsy and sensory, cognitive, and psychological disturbances in children. We still do not have any effective treatments for these conditions.

The current proposal focuses on the interaction between the key cellular components that are closely associated with blood vessels in particular brain regions in the developing brain, and it seeks to determine the contribution of immune cells to the secondary brain injury caused by intracerebral haemorrhage.

The proposed work will also determine how resident immune cells in the brain modulate oligodendrocyte development and myelination and thus affect white-matter development at the critical developmental time window for preterm infants.

The success of this research will contribute to identifying the molecular processes that lead to the unique vulnerability in preterm infants to brain injury.

This will hopefully lead to the development of novel preventive strategies in susceptible populations and to new therapeutic strategies, which together will reduce the occurrence and suffering from these devastating neurological syndromes.