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Imagine a future where proactive health strategies can be designed at or before birth. WISE (Wellbeing of Individuals Starts Early) aims to create a new domain of knowledge, rethinking how we develop treatments, policies, and behaviors that impact newborn health.

Enter WISE (Wellbeing of Individuals Starts Early) Program in Metabolic Medicine—a groundbreaking new initiative led by Professor Geoffrey Chang at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in collaboration with the UC San Diego’s HUMANOID™ Center of Excellence that aims to revolutionize maternal-child health.

With new $ 3.3M in funding secured from the NIH/Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), WISE is set to redefine how we approach health and disease prevention—starting at birth.

Program leads (pictured here): Geoffrey Chang, Pradipta Ghosh and Raymond Sunhaditya

What is WISE? 

More about WISE: Central to WISE is the belief that staying healthy can never begin too early. For example, a baby’s brain is nothing short of a marvel—forming over 1 million new neural connections per second as it rapidly grows to nearly full size by age five. But what if we could influence this process? What if we could optimize the development of a baby’s brain, immune system and virtually any organ and general wellbeing with precision medicine and nutrition before diseases have can set in?

🔹 A First-of-Its-Kind Transporter Atlas – WISE will map how key transporters regulate essential nutrients and metabolites across the mother-infant-gut-brain axis, shaping lifelong health.
🔹 Deorphanizing Transporters – Thousands of molecules impact fetal development, but only a fraction of transporters that control their movement are understood. WISE will identify these transporters and their functions.
🔹 A New Domain of Knowledge – By integrating metabolomics, proteomics, and transporter biology, WISE will uncover precision nutrition and medicine strategies that optimize maternal and child health.

🔬 The Big Questions WISE Will Answer:
✅ How do transporters regulate metabolite levels to optimize infant growth and brain development?
✅ What molecules and drugs do these transporters recognize, and how can this knowledge improve pregnancy and post-partum outcomes?
✅ What are the fundamental rules of transport that could revolutionize neonatal medicine?

This ambitious initiative isn’t just about discovery—it’s about creating the future of preventive medicine, transforming maternal-infant care, and ensuring health from the very start of life.

WISE will produce: (i) omics-validated near-physiologic model systems to study transport along the maternal-infant axis; (ii) an integrated in silico model for mother-infant metabolite-transporter pairs, which will enable structure-based predictions of transport ‘rules’, that can be experimentally validated for their ability to have long-lasting impact on fetal health. The ability to predict these effects promises to transform our approach to nutritional optimization and drugs (therapeutics or abuse) in pregnancy, an area that currently lacks comprehensive or actionable scientific evidence.

Stay tuned as WISE embarks on this unprecedented journey. The future of neonatal medicine starts now!

🚀 HUMANOID™: Meet Us at Phase Zero.

Schedule Services Now: iLab Organizer :: The Institute for Network Medicine (ilabsolutions.com)

So, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with the UC San Diego HUMANOID™ Center today and let’s redefine the future of drug discovery together! 🚀

Stay curious, stay innovative, and let's create a healthier world! 🌍