Facilitating Increased Research on Poor Pregnancy Outcomes

The GAPPS Repository is the first open source pregnancy-focused biobank, and has become a global leader in standardizing and harmonizing collections across studies in high-, medium-, and low-resource settings. The GAPPS Repository was established in 2008, in response to researchers worldwide telling us that they needed high quality specimens associated with clinical and demographic data and metadata -- which is critically important for utilizing novel technologies and tools to improve our understanding of the biology of pregnancy. We will describe the GAPPS data and specimen collections; provide examples of how these specimens and data can be used to improve the understanding of normal and abnormal pregnancy, and the understanding of the long-term health and disease processes that may begin during fetal development; and outline the global harmonization efforts underway.