BUMP – the Borne Uterine Mapping Project
Research institutes:
King’s College London,
Imperial College London,
University College London,
Newcastle University,
Cambridge University,
University of Turin and global collaborators.Project dates:
Feasibility study completed summer 2025
Future expansion phase ‘Big BUMP’ plannedFunding awarded:
£1million
We don’t know enough about how labour begins and progresses to be able to prevent preterm birth. BUMP is a world-leading research project to create a map of the womb during normal and preterm labour. The project will revolutionise our understanding of preterm labour, and help accelerate discoveries to stop babies from being born too soon.
Why is this project needed?
Across the world, preterm birth kills one baby every 40 seconds and is responsible for 1 in 3 of all neonatal deaths. This makes preterm birth the single largest killer of children under five years old.
Despite decades of research, we still do not have the treatments we need to delay labour. This means we can’t effectively reduce the risks of life-long disability or death that come with preterm births.
Borne saw that a new approach was needed. So in 2020, we launched the Borne Collaborative, to bring together global experts in preterm birth to understand the barriers to research breakthroughs.
They agreed that the research to date has often been fragmented, carried out by isolated research groups with a narrow focus. While this has improved some of our understanding, there is still much we don’t know about how labour begins, how different tissues work together, and what goes wrong in preterm labour.
“We are all doing fantastic research, making inferences and drawing conclusions on the data that we collect. But we are like the blind men and the elephant. The hardest thing is seeing the whole picture.” Prof Steve Lye, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Toronto
In response, we launched BUMP – a research project that will transform our understanding of pregnancy and labour, and help stop babies being born too soon.
What is BUMP?
The Borne Uterine Mapping Project (BUMP) is creating a map of what is happening in the womb during labour. This is being done by gathering a unique collection of samples donated during pregnancy and after birth, analysed in detail using cutting-edge technology. The samples and data are being shared with scientists worldwide to enable them to make the breakthroughs we need.
By encouraging collaboration, this project is enabling doctors and scientists to get the full picture of the process of labour, helping them find the interventions we need to stop babies from being born too soon.
“Without understanding the mechanism of preterm birth, we are never going to get a treatment”. Prof Mark Johnson, consultant obstetrician at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, and founder of Borne.
There are several important elements to BUMP, explained in more detail below:
Recruitment and sample collection
At the heart of this pioneering project are pregnant women, who are donating samples during their pregnancy and a variety of maternal tissue after they deliver their baby via caesarean section. They include women in preterm labour, as well as full-term pregnancies, both in labour and not in labour.
The tissues being collected include:
- Womb tissue samples collected from multiple locations within the womb after caesarean delivery of the baby
- Amniotic fluid
- Foetal membranes which surround the baby (amnion and chorion)
- Placenta
- Vaginal swabs
- Blood and urine samples
These samples are collected and processed using standardised protocols and techniques. This ensures that all the samples are comparable, and means that the picture they provide of how labour occurs is accurate and reflects reality.
The samples are subjected to the core analysis (see below). The remaining samples are then securely stored in biobanks, which means that they can be accessed again in the future if further analysis needs to be carried out.
Core analysis of samples
The goal of BUMP is to build new foundations for our understanding preterm birth. This is being achieved by using state-of-the-art techniques to analyse the cells and tissues donated by pregnant women.
These methods are being used to identify changes in key molecules before and during labour. The data generated will help scientists understand the different causes driving preterm birth, and uncover potential targets for new interventions.
Data sharing
The data generated from the core analysis is linked to the samples and anonymised information from mothers and babies, and all this is stored in a central database. This data can be securely shared with scientists worldwide, to accelerate their research.
Expansion to the future – ‘Big BUMP’
With the successful completion of the feasibility study (see updates below), the BUMP team are now scaling up the project, into a phase we call ‘Big BUMP’.
The plan for Big BUMP is to expand collection centres to locations across the UK and the world. This will allow the team to recruit donors from a more diverse background, and from different countries where the causes of preterm birth may differ from the UK. It will also provide an opportunity to test preventative interventions in different settings, to make sure they are appropriate and effective for mothers worldwide.
The difference BUMP will make
“BUMP will transform the landscape of preterm birth research.” Professor Rachel Tribe, professor of maternal and perinatal science at King’s College London, and lead scientist for BUMP.
BUMP is a unique project, one that has never been attempted at this scale in this depth.
The goal of BUMP is to inspire collaboration – to bring together the fragmented field of preterm birth research. This will lead us to what we’ve been lacking to date: a full understanding of what happens during pregnancy and labour, and the different causes of preterm labour.
The global infrastructure that will be created through BUMP will also allow researchers to test interventions to delay preterm labour in different settings across the world. Initially, these interventions will be drugs repurposed from other conditions, meaning that new potential treatments will reach women sooner.
BUMP will provide researchers with the evidence they need to develop and test interventions that delay preterm labour – preventing premature birth, and helping more children live.
I'm very enthusiastic about where we are with Borne now. We’re the only preterm birth charity that’s approaching this question in this way, and getting to the point of being able to answer some of these questions, which we haven’t made any progress in answering in years.
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BUMP updates
Summer 2025 – BUMP feasibility study is a success
A project with the scale and ambition of BUMP has never been attempted before. So, the first step was to carry out a feasibility study, to show that BUMP was possible to deliver.
In the two-year feasibility study, the team created the infrastructure and established the workflows that will make BUMP a success. The project has brought together a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, clinicians, surgeons, and data experts from across the UK and beyond.
During the feasibility study, the team focussed on collecting samples from women at full-term, in labour or not. Focusing on full-term pregnancies made it simpler to gain consent from mothers to donate samples, and test the protocols for sample collection, before moving on to recruit women in preterm labour. This approach also allowed the research team to start understanding the fundamentals of normal full-term labour, which will help them identify what goes wrong in preterm labour.
The BUMP team first developed the standardised procedures for sample collection and analysis. Then, they recruited 24 women with a full-term pregnancy to donate samples and data. The team analysed these samples, creating a comprehensive map of the changes in the womb during the transition to labour.
The feasibility study came to an end in the summer of 2025. The research team successfully proved that BUMP was not only feasible, but would achieve its aims – laying the foundations for the next phase of BUMP, known as ‘Big BUMP’.
