Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are traditionally excluded from medical research due to safety concerns. As a result of this, only 5 % of medications have adequate safety information on their use in pregnant or breastfeeding women, and this makes it very hard for doctors and women to make informed decisions about their treatment. Nonetheless, some 90 % of women are exposed to a prescription medication at some point during their pregnancy.
The ultimate goal of ConcePTION is to create a trusted biomedical ecosystem capable of providing evidence-based information on the safety of medications during pregnancy and breastfeeding in an efficient, systematic and ethically responsible way. The information will be provided in a form that is usable by both healthcare providers and patients alike.
The project will achieve this in a number of ways. Firstly, it will improve and unify existing approaches to data collection in this area by re-using existing, de-identified data generated during routine patient care. The project also aims to deliver procedures and tools for the collection of digital data and samples directly from pregnant women.
They will also create the first Europe-wide breast milk biobank for research purposes, and develop tools to predict which drugs are likely to be transferred to breast milk. Finally, the team will establish a web-based drug information knowledge bank.