In Utero

In Utero — Execution

Funds United Kingdom stillbirth-reduction initiatives with prenatal intervention and translational implementation support.

In Utero is a $50 million Wellcome Leap program directed by Sarah Stock, MD, PhD, Professor and Consultant in Maternal and Fetal Health with expertise in stillbirth and preterm birth. The program's central goal is to cut global stillbirth rates in half by creating scalable, non-invasive methods to measure, model, and predict gestational development in utero. The urgency of the problem is quantified by Wellcome Leap as follows: one baby is stillborn every 16 seconds globally, amounting to more than two million stillbirths per year worldwide; in the United States alone, approximately 12,000 stillbirths occur annually — ten times the number of childhood cancer deaths — and 25 to 50 percent of them remain unexplained.

Performer teams have been selected and are in active execution. The original competitive solicitation is closed and no new open call was visible at the time of research. Wellcome Leap programs generally accept applications from universities, nonprofits, for-profit organizations, and research institutes; individuals are not eligible. Award sizes per performer team are not publicly disclosed; the total program pool is $50 million. The program uses a cooperative-agreement mechanism under Wellcome Leap oversight, with milestone-based accountability rather than the investigator-directed model typical of academic grants.

For organizations working in maternal-fetal medicine, placental biology, obstetric monitoring technology, or computational models of fetal development, In Utero represents the current funded frontier at Wellcome Leap. Future solicitations, if any, would likely focus on specific technical gaps in non-invasive gestational assessment. Teams that combine clinical deployment capability with engineering or computational tools — and can articulate a credible path to scalable use in low-resource settings — are best positioned to compete in any future Wellcome Leap maternal health program.