Collaboration and engagement are fundamental elements of ORIGINS at every level.
As such, ORIGINS seeks to engage researchers, clinicians, service providers, government and the wider community.
Through the study of early environments, maternal and paternal physical health and genetics, ORIGINS is building a research platform to enable world class investigations into when and why non-communicable diseases develop. The goal is to reduce the rising epidemic of these chronic conditions through 'a healthy start to life'.
The project began in June 2017 with the aim of recruiting 10,000 children and their families from the Joondalup and Wanneroo communities in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia over a decade. To date, the study has more than 8,500 children as well as mothers, partners and siblings - 17,000 individuals, within family units - providing hundreds of thousands of biological samples and valuable data to the project.
At the beginning of 2023, ORIGINS, completed recruitment of our active cohort, but is continuing to recruit non-active, or routine data, participants.
ORIGINS is collecting detailed information on how a child’s early environment and parents’ physical health and genetics influence the risk of a wide range of diseases and conditions such as asthma, eczema, food allergies, mental health issues, diabetes, obesity and autism.
ORIGINS is a significant asset for the WA community as it will increase child and adolescent health research capacity, research productivity and translational impact.
ORIGINS will have substantial short-term and long-term benefits for WA and Australia, providing a strong collaborative and training environment, international competitiveness, and will attract new expertise and strategic partnerships to WA.
Collaborating with ORIGINS
As well as facilitating strategic long-term research capacity, ORIGINS is a pipeline for short-term productivity through a series of clinical trials, early interventions, mechanistic studies and targeted research questions to improve maternal and paternal health and the early environment of the child.
We continue to work closely within existing and newly established partnerships that allow us to spread our reach a little further, to achieve more and to learn from each other. The project's growing reputation and influence allows us to develop opportunities, building an extensive collaborative network with researchers and organisations from diverse fields across the world.
ORIGINS Collaboration Policy
ORIGINS Collaboration Policy outlines the conditions, behaviours, expectations and processes for all activities undertaken with the project, as well as requests for access to the cohort, project resources, and/or data.