A Newcastle professor has been awarded a $3 million grant to develop drugs aimed at preventing premature births and associated health risks.
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About 9 per cent of pregnancies end up as premature births, a statistic that is reflected in the Hunter.
Laureate Professor Roger Smith, of University of Newcastle, said "30 per cent of newborn baby deaths are related to prematurity".
"If you're born prematurely, you have an increased risk of many health problems," Professor Smith said.
"It increases the likelihood you'll have difficulty at school and that reduces your economic opportunities."
He said premature birth disproportionately affected Indigenous people, making them more susceptible to health problems such as kidney disease.
Professor Smith's project was one of 216 to receive a National Health and Medical Research Council [NHMRC] grant, worth a combined $379 million.
The grants were aimed at tackling "the nation's greatest health challenges".
NHMRC CEO Professor Steve Wesselingh said the grants enable researchers to "harness their skills and knowledge to produce revolutionary science".
Professor Smith said premature birth rates were rising, so the need for effective treatment was paramount.
"Current treatment can only delay birth for a few days," he said.
The grant money will be used to develop nanoparticles that target drugs to the muscle of the uterus.
"That's important because many of the drugs that doctors would like to use for premature labour can't be used because of side effects on the mother or baby," he said.
Delivering drugs specifically to the uterus muscle, without affecting other parts of the body, would improve their safety and effectiveness.
This approach was "quite a big advance in treatment".
Professor Smith heads Hunter Medical Research Institute's mothers and babies research program, a world leader in premature birth.
In 1995, he discovered a biological clock in the placenta that regulates the length of human pregnancy.
"Since that time, we've been working to understand more of the links between that clock and how it gets prematurely activated to cause preterm birth."
He began his research 40 years ago after his twins were born.
"I realised nobody knew the answer to what determined the length of human pregnancy," he said.
Professor Smith said it was difficult to research premature birth because "you can't do experiments on pregnant women for ethical reasons".
And animals can't be used for the research because their reproduction processes are different to humans.
However, his team has obtained uterus muscle samples from consenting patients during caesarean sections at John Hunter Hospital.
In studying these samples, they determined how genes in the uterus muscle switched on as women went into labour.
"That has enabled us to identify the pathway to the onset of contractions," he said.
This will help to design drugs aimed at stopping premature labour.
"One of the other big problems is the pharmaceutical industry - Big Pharma - is not particularly interested in supporting research into premature labour," he said.
"The reason is that if anything goes wrong, it's big news and the companies won't want to lose their reputation.
"So it's a difficult area to make scientific advances that are translated into new drugs."
The others were: Professor Murray Cairns, whose research to improve the treatment of schizophrenia recevied $2,897,165; Professor Peter Gibson, who received $2,553,040 for asthma research; Dr Shafiq Syed who received $662,040 for cancer research; Dr Yuchen Feng who received $579,632 for lung cancer research; and Dr William Reay who received $662,040 for research into using genetics to improve the management of chronic disorders.
