“An artificial uterus – the incubator 2.0 – will become a reality within 10 years,” says Jasmijn Kok, one of the founders of the spin-off Juno. Together with researchers from the department of Industrial Design from the Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, including her twin sister Lyla Kok, she wants to bring a technology that increases the chances of survival of extremely premature babies to the market. “It’s not science fiction.”
What once started as a wild idea, a moon shot, is now taking shape, co-founder Myrthe van der Ven continues. At congresses in Japan in the 1970s, gynecologist Guid Oei first saw initial ideas for accommodating extremely premature babies not in an incubator, but underwater in an artificial uterus.