The Tommy's charity exists to save babies' lives, funding research into the causes and prevention of pregnancy complications that lead to miscarriage, stillbirth and premature birth. Tommy's also provide pregnancy health information for parents-to-be. Tommy's fund research in four centres of excellence: The Tommy's National Centre for Miscarriage Research (Warwick, Imperial, Birmingham) The Tommy's Maternal and Fetal Research Centre in St Thomas's London The Tommy's Maternal and Fetal Research Centre in Edinburgh The Tommy's Maternal and Fetal Research Centre in Manchester Research is aimed at understanding reproductive pathology so that baby's lives can be saved. Each day in the UK, 2,127 babies are born, 10 babies are stillborn, 648 babies are miscarried and 152 babies are born preterm. Often clinicians are not able to give couples causes for their pregnancy losses, so Tommy's exist to find causes and prevent these deaths. However, there is a limit to what Tommy's charitable fund raising can achieve, and by the terms of Tommy's mission, they prioritise funding for research that has the potential to deliver new diagnostics and treatments, not funding for the development of research infrastructure. The goal of the proposed Tommy's Reproductive Health Biobank is to augment and enhance six existing biobanks at four Tommy's funded centres, to provide added value for research. The biobank will be unique in combining expertise from these centres, four of the largest reproductive health research groups in the UK, into a single functional unit of international significance. The samples comprise of tissues obtained before pregnancy, at the time of miscarriage or during complex pregnancies, as well as in normal pregnancy. Clinical data will be linked to the samples using advanced soft-ware technology. Tommy's Net is a software package and a server recently developed using funding provided by the Tommy's charity. Tommy's Net contains information on couples with recurrent miscarriage that consent. It is also able to link this information to other test results, samples and pregnancy outcome details held on other NHS databases. The MRC biobank funding will allow data on other pregnancy complications to be stored in the same way in the same system. As part of Tommy's Biobank, we will build on the Tommy's Net system to provide a registry of databases for historic collections, and a combined database using an agreed dataset for each sample collected in the future. This linked biobank will allow samples from each site to be characterised and tracked, and make them more accessible to the wider research community.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.