(Wednesday August 19, 2015) Beirut, Lebanon – The American University of Beirut Medical Center and Faculty of Medicine announced today that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Robert Habib, PhD of the Department of Internal Medicine at the American University of Beirut (Beirut, Lebanon) was awarded a Phase I GCE grant and will pursue an innovative global health and development research project, titled "Use of Physiologic Signal Complexity and Correlation Properties to Quantify Brain Development in Infants."
Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Dr. Habib’s project is one of more than 50 Grand Challenges Explorations Round 14 grants announced by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from over 1700 received applications.
To receive funding, Dr. Robert Habib and other Grand Challenges Explorations winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of five critical global health and development topic areas that included development of the new ways to measure fetal and infant brain development. The foundation will be accepting applications for the next GCE round in September 2015.
“We are so happy with this news,” said Dr. Habib. “The grant research will help us in exploring a novel, practical and indirect approach to quantify the extent of brain development of premature babies compared to healthy full term babies” he added.
Infants born prematurely will frequently suffer from brain development problems that may affect them in many ways and for the rest of their lives. Early intervention aimed at aiding the brain development in such infants may help reduce the long-term adverse effects. Yet, it is currently difficult, cumbersome, impractical and expensive to assess and quantify brain development in the very challenging infant population explained Dr. Habib.
“We are so proud that our project is the only one funded from MENA region for this round and first ever from Lebanon,” said Dr. Habib.
The proposed research will be based on the concepts that heart and breathing rhythms, or patterns such as how fast and how deep, are ultimately controlled by the brain or central nervous system. Hence, it is reasoned that these patterns will be analyzed mathematically and the results will be different in premature (abnormal) versus full term (normal) babies.
The Principal Investigator will conduct the needed experimentation and analyses to address the above aims. If successful, this research will then provide a solid foundation for a larger systematic set of experiments under a Phase II Gates foundation grant. Such a grant would aim to further develop the novel approach such that it may be used with ease and anywhere needed from the hospital intensive care unit, to doctor clinics to the infant's own home.