1059Innovative epidemiological methods in a whole-of-state cohort of children and parents: Generation Victoria (GenV)
Authors: Hu Yanhong Jessika , Wake Melissa , Clifford Susan , Said Jo 
Published: September 2021

Focus and outcomes for participants

“Children are our future” - the wellbeing of our future adults will influence the future of the world. However, this generation of children and mid-life adults face increasing rates of complex health and development problems, and many of them are preventable. Traditional research approaches are not keeping pace with need. Discovery and testing of solutions is blocked by the lack of fast, cheap, large-scale, low burden and effective ways to conduct research for the population and its many subgroups. Innovation in epidemiological methods is required to deliver large scale studies of unprecedented scale and scope. These will support research that enables better prevention, prediction and treatment – all of which are needed to solve today’s pressing child and adult health problems.

This 90-minute symposium will draw on the forthcoming Generation Victoria (GenV) to illustrate innovative epidemiological methods established in its foundation phase to enable large-scale studies. GenV is designed to address physical, mental and social issues experienced during childhood and mid-adulthood, as well as the antecedents of a wide range of diseases of ageing. Parents of all newborns (estimated. 170,000) in the state of Victoria (population 6.5 million), Australia, will be approached from 2021 for two full years. Following consent, GenV proposes to bank biosamples collected during routine care, link to administrative and clinical data, and directly collect parent and child data using interactive electronic interfaces with the potential for face-to-face assessment during the school years. Encompassing clinical trials, registries, health services and geospatial as well as discovery research, GenV’s initial focus will be on pregnancy and newborns, reaching into regional and rural communities and traditionally hard-to-reach groups in sizeable numbers. Permission will be sought to link trials, registries, and health services research with existing pre- and post-birth administrative and electronic health record datasets, and also to bank biospecimens collected during routine care.

We will discuss why innovation is essential to the next wave of large-scale studies such as GenV, and share practical examples of method innovations being developed within GenV. We will forecast the opportunities and challenges of large-scale studies for improving wellbeing and reducing the disease burden with children and adults.

Focus:

Outcomes:

Rationale for the symposium, including for its inclusion in the Congress

The future wellbeing and productivity of our societies depend on wellbeing and good health of our children and adults. However, today’s children and mid-life adults are facing both old and new challenges. Traditional research approaches have largely failed to deliver progress towards solving these challenges. For example, most existing cohorts only allow for observational follow up, and children are greatly under-represented in gold-standard clinical trials, which leads to less evidence to children’s treatment and prevention. Multi-purpose, low burden, high up-take innovative large studies are required to address these gaps.

GenV seeks to generate translatable evidence (prediction, prevention, treatments, and services) to improve future wellbeing and reduce the future disease burden of children and adults. It will allow researchers, clinicians and policy makers to better understand the issues affecting Victorian children and their families with greater speed and precision, and therefore outcomes be translated more quickly into practice. Also it will help facilitate an environment where researchers, clinicians, policy makers, and other organisations can come together to enact change for future generations’ wellbeing.

With this symposium, we intend to share our reflections on how the scale of cohort studies is changing, and showcase new trends in research design. The GenV team will then show how we practically achieve innovation in large-study methodology and design, with the aim of encouraging others to think ambitiously at large-scale. We will share our intentions and rationale for these innovations as well as the challenges. The symposium is designed to spark a discussion with the audience, seeking their reflections and suggestions on shaping our innovations. Finally, we aim to encourage researchers (especially early career researchers) to exchange their vision and views on innovations and methods for cohort studies.

Presentation program (90 minutes)

Names of presenters

Prof Melissa Wake, Dr Susan Clifford, Dr Yanhong Jessika Hu, A/Prof Jo Said, Dr Joan Leong, Dr Suzanne Mavoa.