Almost half of Australian preschool aged children experience tooth decay. Tooth decay can impact on a child€s ability to eat, sleep, learn and grow. Australian interventions to reduce childhood decay have focused mainly on the postnatal period, despite international evidence showing antenatal interventions can positively impact a child€s oral health. This study will explore the long-term impact on the children of women who received an oral health intervention during pregnancy, and establish if the intervention improves childhood oral health.

Growth-restricted babies are often born with damaged brains, including injury to the white matter, and they often then develop learning and behavioural problems, and even cerebral palsy. With no treatment for white matter injury, our challenge is to develop safe and effective therapies. We will test a novel therapy to restore white matter development in an animal model of fetal growth restriction, thus providing essential information as a first step towards a clinical drug trial with growth-restricted human infants.

The proposed project will provide critical information to policy, services and programs to improve the mental health care of Aboriginal children. Drawing on a unique partnership with the Aboriginal Health & Medical Research Council and three Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services on the SEARCH study, it will provide the first long term data about social and emotional well-being in urban Aboriginal children and the factors, including patterns of mental health service use, which influence it over time.

Chronic lung disease in children is responsible for a high burden of disease and reduced life expectancy, especially in Indigenous populations. Moraxella catarrhalis is one of the three most important bacteria found in the lungs of children with respiratory disease but has received comparatively little research attention. We plan to study the virulence and antibiotic resistance of M. catarrhalis from the upper and lower airways of children with chronic lung disease using standard microbiological testing and genomic analyses.

Obesity affects one in four children and is strongly implicated in adult €diseases of ageing€, especially heart disease and diabetes. Typically, the implications of obesity have been examined in adulthood. Using novel data, we have a unique opportunity to explore which early growth patterns in the first decade (measured biennially) are most damaging to adolescent cardiometabolic health (lipid/inflammation). Ultimately, we hope that better prediction will avoid unnecessary intervention, while targeting research and treatment to those children with most to gain.

This project will investigate prescribing of antipsychotic drugs to Australian children and teenagers. Antipsychotics are powerful psychiatric drugs that are increasingly prescribed for behaviour problems. This project will investigate which children and young teenagers are prescribed antipsychotics, by whom, and for what reasons. It will also investigate how antipsychotics affect them at the time (physically, mentally, socially, and at school) and as they grow older. It will provide valuable information about the patterns and benefits and harms of these drugs.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a brain cancer and one of the deadliest forms of human cancer known. Intensification of chemotherapy often results in permanent morbidity in children. This study aims to develop a new nanocarrier that overcomes the blood€brain barrier (BBB), and to minimise drug-resistance in GBM to improve therapeutic efficacy and to minimise side effect. The BBB-penetrating performance, drug delivery efficiency, efficacy, pharmacokinetics and safety of this nanocarrier will be evaluated systematically using in-vitro and in-vivo models.

The ability to diagnose autism via a blood test would be a major advance, and positively impact upon the lives of millions of children worldwide by facilitating effective early intervention. In this project, we will lay the scientific foundations for the development of such a blood test. To do so, we will identify circulating RNA biomarkers within serum that are dysregulated in autistic individuals, and use machine learning to define a predictive diagnostic model based around these RNAs.