Wellcome Leap has awarded Michelle Oyen, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis' McKelvey School of Engineering, a multiyear contract to advance methods to assess placental function. Oyen will join Wellcome Leap's In Utero program, which aims to create the scalable capacity to measure, model and predict gestational development with a primary goal to reduce stillbirth rates by half.
Oyen's collaborators include Ulugbek Kamilov, an assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering and of computer science and engineering, and Anthony Odibo, MD, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the School of Medicine.
In February, Oyen and Odibo received a $30,000 collaboration initiation grant in women's health technologies with co‐funding from the McKelvey School of Engineering and the medical school's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The funding helped establish their research studying placental function and fetal growth restriction.
