Center for Early Relational Health

The MaCRO Consortium

An Award-Winning Approach to Interdepartmental Team Science

The Center for Early Relational Health works in partnership with the Maternal Child Research Operations (MaCRO) Consortium: a groundbreaking model that champions interdepartmental collaboration to promote efficient research for anyone at Columbia University interested in pre/postnatal maternal and/or child outcomes. 

To accomplish this mission, MaCRO: 

  1. Connects researchers with others who may be valuable to their work 
  2. Ensures no two individuals/teams across Columbia are investigating the same question 
  3. Helps researchers at various career stages identify and create shared, actionable resources 

In July 2024, MaCRO was awarded the inaugural Team Science Award of Distinction for Clinical and Translational Research, after 4 years of “exemplary work across three departments [that] has made a significant impact on our understanding of maternal and child health… advancing science and improving lives.” 

Open-Science Biospecimen Access for Maternal-Infant Outcomes 

To support these clinical and translational research studies, MaCRO established the PeriNatal BioBank (PNBB): an all-in-one biobanking service that enrolls pregnant women and offspring, to create a standing longitudinal biobank of samples and clinical data. 

In the spirit of open science, researchers across and beyond the Center for ERH can access PNBB’s biospecimen core, including: 

  • maternal urine and blood (whole blood, plasma, buffy coat) during pregnancy and at delivery 
  • fetal cord blood (whole blood, plasma, buffy coat) at delivery 
  • and placental tissue (both fetal and maternal side) at delivery 

Along with the freedom to use these biospecimens in their own work, investigators can obtain clinical data from the OB Commons database, as well as longitudinal data on maternal and child outcomes. 

To date, under the directorship of Morgan Firestein, PhD, PNBB has enrolled over 500 mother-infant dyads and conducts remote follow-up of all participating dyads at 12 months postpartum, to support biomarker research and long-term outcomes of both mothers (physical health, mental health) and infants (physical development, neurobehavioral development). 

Collaborative Science for Universal Family Health 

Maternal-Infant research is particularly difficult because it hinges on the successful interface of two distinct specialities. Few obstetricians or pediatricians have expertise in both moms and babies, in part because their specialties are so demanding (and sometimes high-risk). 

Without access to a team science infrastructure, their clinical knowledge and research data remain largely siloed from each other. For those striving to make a difference in the maternal-infant health field, that makes it challenging to even access the data they need, let alone to generate that data. 

But the Center for ERH and MaCRO create true interdepartmental partnerships: rather than looking at maternal or child outcomes in a vacuum, our teams leverage every opportunity to understand how these outcomes influence each other, creating a fuller picture of mother-child health. 

In fact, MaCRO and the Center for ERH have made Columbia one of very few institutions where Pediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Psychiatry — departments not typically involved in the same projects — succeed in maintaining active studies together. 

It is exceedingly rare to have such successful initiatives at this scale that not only generate data on the health of babies, children, and parents, but also meaningfully contribute to patient outcomes. Many of the researchers who lead these joint studies are faculty at both MaCRO and the Center for ERH — our collaborative approach brings a deep understanding of the populations we study, while taking into account the real-world, interrelated context of our data. 

This enables high-impact discoveries that contribute to multiple fields of research simultaneously, making real-world change for families possible. One particularly noteworthy example of how our nimble data translation impacts family outcomes is how COMBO (which emerged from an early MaCRO working group) influenced a reversal in the precautionary pandemic policy of separating moms and babies in the hospital, on a national and global scale.