Objectives

The overall NEOMUNE objective, to develop new diet and gut microbiota treatments for newborn infants, is divided into five sub-objectives

1. To demonstrate if differences in the gut microbiota shortly after birth, is related to later infection resistance, gut and brain maturation.
2. To test if different milk feeding regimens will affect immunity, gut and brain maturation, directly or via changes to the gut microbiota.
3. To provide proof of concept for the use of novel milk diets, milk-derived components, or probiotic bacterial cultures in newborn infants.
4. To lower the societal burden of infants (term, preterm) that show poor growth, organ immaturity and low infection resistance, both short and long term.
5. To identify the cultural factors that affect clinical care procedures for weak newborn infants in different countries, and show how these influence novel methods.

 The objectives will be studies in three work packages.