Funding outcome

Newborn babies can get very sick from infections. These infections can hurt their fragile organs and can sometimes cause death. Babies can get infections from their mothers, from the hospital, or from the world around them. Every year, 5 million babies get serious infections, and 800,000 of them die. Doctors give the sick babies plenty of fluids and antibiotics to treat the infections and kill the bacteria. But antibiotics cannot stop the damage caused by inflammation, which is the body’s response to infection. Right now, there is no treatment that can stop this damage and better protect babies. This project will test our promising new drug to see if it can help protect the baby better from inflammatory harm during infection. Our team has developed two new drugs that work better when used together. These drugs help control inflammation by targeting two inflammatory messengers in the body called IL-1 and IL-6. They have already worked well in studies with pregnant and newborn animals. Our research collaborator recently created a model of newborn infection in 3-day-old rats. The rats are given bacteria that make many of them very sick, and about one-third die. When our two drugs are given together, they help prevent death and reduce sickness in the surviving rats. In this project, we will first find the best dose of the drug and the best time to give it after infection. Then, we will study how the drug protects newborns. We will look at the inflammatory signals and cells caused by the infection to see how the drug blocks harmful changes. If this project is successful, it could lead to a new treatment that helps protect newborn babies from damage from serious infections early in life.