Feb 25, 2026 · 41 min · 9 segments
Dr. Tomiko Oskotsky, who co-directs The March of Dimes Database for Preterm Birth Research, discusses the database’s recent wins: being chosen for a National Science Foundation AI program and…
Tomiko OskotskyGuestOlesya PlekheHostAnd so I want to give a very quick overview of the database, which is a goldmine.
So this is a repository of every piece of molecular data generated by a March of Dimes PRC since 2015.
There are 79 studies in there right now, actively growing every day, every week, every month.
It is the only public multi-omic resource for preterm birth research in the world.
And it brings together multiple types of biological data, including DNA, RNA, immune system markers, and the vaginal microbiome.
It underscores March of Dimes commitment to open science, collaboration, and accelerating the pace of research progress.
So a lot of unique data in the database, obviously, but perhaps the most important part, Tomiko, is that it's being shared publicly with the world, with other experts who may not have had access to it otherwise.
This is something Emory, our chief scientific advisor, is very passionate about and feels strongly about.
All of us in the Prematurity Research Centers are passionate about ensuring that the work we are performing, the data that we're generating, are able to be reused by others and lead to exciting, novel discoveries.
And for us, open science, it's this idea of research inputs and outputs like data and code and methods and papers that should be accessible as widely as possible to many others so that they can verify and reuse them and build on them.
When we share all of this data, we can turn single studies into compounding knowledge, and the results can get checked, new questions can get asked, and discoveries move from being interesting to impactful at a much faster pace.
And so I want to give a very quick overview of the database, which is a goldmine.
So this is a repository of every piece of molecular data generated by a March of Dimes PRC since 2015.
There are 79 studies in there right now, actively growing every day, every week, every month.
It is the only public multi-omic resource for preterm birth research in the world.
And it brings together multiple types of biological data, including DNA, RNA, immune system markers, and the vaginal microbiome.
It underscores March of Dimes commitment to open science, collaboration, and accelerating the pace of research progress.
So a lot of unique data in the database, obviously, but perhaps the most important part, Tomiko, is that it's being shared publicly with the world, with other experts who may not have had access to it otherwise.
This is something Emory, our chief scientific advisor, is very passionate about and feels strongly about.
All of us in the Prematurity Research Centers are passionate about ensuring that the work we are performing, the data that we're generating, are able to be reused by others and lead to exciting, novel discoveries.
And for us, open science, it's this idea of research inputs and outputs like data and code and methods and papers that should be accessible as widely as possible to many others so that they can verify and reuse them and build on them.
When we share all of this data, we can turn single studies into compounding knowledge, and the results can get checked, new questions can get asked, and discoveries move from being interesting to impactful at a much faster pace.
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