ORIGINS: A Unique World Class Interventional Research Enabling Platform

ORIGINS is the largest study of its kind in Australia, following 10,000 babies from their time in the womb, investigating the prevention of non-communicable diseases as well as discovering how every child, adult, and family can reach their full potential. 

What Sets Us Apart? 

ORIGINS is grounded in making meaningful changes in policy and practice that will reduce the burden of common health conditions through early interventions.

In addition to observational data, ORIGINS provides a framework for a series of smaller intervention studies nested within the main observational cohort. A series of different studies are integrated within ORIGINS to improve modifiable aspects of the early life environment including nutrition, physical activity, microbial diversity, microplastics, environmental pollutants, green space, blue space, weight gain, language development and mental wellbeing. 

This innovative approach will enable strategic interdisciplinary collaboration, focused follow-up and a holistic multisystem approach to identify how to achieve healthier lives from the start, ultimately benefiting the whole community. 

Current Status 

See key statistics since ORIGINS' conception in 2017: 

• We have achieved our key recruiment milestone of 10,000 newborn participants. 
• The project includes 20,000 participants in total including mothers, fathers, and participant's siblings. 
• We have completed nearly 3,000 checks on one-year infants. 
• We have collected over 16 million data points stored in the ORIGINS Databank and 400,00 aliquoted samples stored in the ORIGINS Biobank.  
• We have 70 sub-projects nested within the ORIGINS infrastructure including observational, interventional, and clinical trial projects. 
• We currently collaborative over 300 national and international researchers who are actively engaged with ORIGINS. 

Our Plan

ORIGINS aims to improve the health of the next generation through a better understanding of how to optimise the early environment. 

By the end of 2024, we aimed to have recruited 10,000 women and their partners early in pregnancy at Joondalup Health Campus (JHC), which we were successful in achieving this October. These participants were involved in the collection of biological samples, routine data and web-based questionnaires on their physical and mental health, diet, physical activity patterns and a range of factors in their environment.

This has created an extensive Biobank and Databank which is only continuing to grow larger as the projects participants grow older. We will intensively follow up these families into adolescence and beyond, assessing how these early life exposures influenced their child’s growth, development and health, preschool, primary school literacy, numeracy and behaviour.

ORIGINS’ significant Biobank, which includes DNA, breast milk, urine, plasma and mononuclear cells, will build substantial additional future capacity to address critical issues surrounding child health, including genetic, epigenetic, metagenomic and metabolomic studies, as technologies and new avenues of investigation evolve. 

Our Research Enabling Platform

The ORIGINS Research Enabling Platform allows researchers to: 

• Utilise ORIGINS to answer questions relating to physical and mental health in mothers, fathers and their children. 
• Discover novel biomarkers of common and rare diseases with the intention of primary prevention and/or reducing symptoms.
• Identify early risk and causal factors for children who enter the education system with challenges relating to literacy, numeracy, behaviour, anxiety, depression, ADHD, austism spectrum disorder and more. 
• Better understand the causal pathways and associations relating to environmental pollutants, which include plastic products on child health. 
• Using data linkage, the ORIGINS platform integrates information from a variety of sectors, including healthcare, government records, education, justice, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, and Commonwealth data.
• Linking the ORIGINS platform to environmental data including heat maps, green space, blue space, fast food outlets, and pollutants. 
• Develop a screening tool with a clear pathway that can be used throughout WA for children and their parents to receive support and guidance with appropriate referrals to enable early prevention and intervention.
• Use the ORIGINS platform to pilot test appropriate prevention and interventions programs in preschool and primary school children to improve school performance, behaviour and family functioning.
• Develop and implement ‘The Flourishing Child Program’ to promote positive attributes that enhance child development, improve mental health and behaviour in our communities. 
• Provide easily accessible answers to members of the community who are looking for timely responses. 
• Enhance cutting edge research opportunities across WA, nationally and internationally.