A Carle Illinois College of Medicine student who is creating a tool to make difficult births safer for mothers and babies has earned the title of 2025 Illinois Young Innovator of the Year.
Anthony Wong and his team are engineering a new assisted delivery tool to give doctors a safer alternative to existing high-risk instruments now used in complex childbirths. Wong won first place in the Illinois Innovation Network’s Falling Walls Lab Illinois competition and will present the team’s design to an international panel of judges in November.
Wong says the team’s device, called PeriAssist, is designed for use in difficult deliveries when labor stalls. “PeriAssist is breaking new ground by replacing outdated, high-risk instruments with a design that is intuitive, safer, and easier to use in both high and low-resource settings,” Wong explained.
Currently, doctors assisting in these deliveries must choose between using rigid tools like forceps or vacuum cups, which can cause injuries, or performing a Cesarean section, which can also carry risks. “PeriAssist uses an inflatable ring that surrounds the baby’s head. Unlike metal forceps or suction devices, the ring distributes pressure evenly, reducing the risk of skull injury or nerve damage for the baby,” Wong said.
Wong and teammates Sanskruthi "Priya" Guduri, and Claire Lee were inspired to create PeriAssist after seeing challenging births first-hand during their clinical rotations in obstetrics. “Talking to OB/GYNs at Carle Health, we found that many said they wished for better alternatives for assisted vaginal delivery tools,” he said. Both Guduri and Lee aspire for careers in obstetrics and gynecology, while Wong is pursuing residency in internal medicine. iMBA student Galina Mihalkina is also part of the team.
A panel of judges made up of leaders from Illinois’ public universities selected Wong’s presentation out of a field of 15 young innovators and entrepreneurs. The title comes with support to attend the international Falling Walls Lab finale on November 6, 2025, in Berlin, Germany, where Wong will pitch their device to an international judging panel.
Falling Walls Lab is a fast-paced contest where competitors have just three minutes to propose a research-based solution to a global problem. This is the third year in a row that a CI MED student has won the Falling Walls Illinois competition. Previous winners were Bhargavee Gnanasambandam (2023) with a proposal for a new test to rapidly detect human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer, and Sanskruthi Guduri (2024), who proposed a device that leverages ultrasound to clear debris from the camera lens at the end of a laparoscope used in minimally invasive surgical procedures.