Mary A. Oliver, School of Animal Sciences Virginia Tech is the 2026 winner of the Campion Fund Award for the best oral presentation at the 2026 annual meeting of the Triangle Consortium for Reproductive Biology. Her work was entitled “ Interleukin-6 restores embryonic disc development in bovine blastocysts placed into extended culture”. She studied how epiblasts and hypoblasts lineages develop as the embryonic disc prepares for gastrulation in culture and compared blastocysts transferred at 7 days of culture and then flushed from oviducts to blastocysts cultured for 12 days. She did not find any differences in the two groups in percentages of epiblasts and hypoblasts. However, epiblasts were greater in the extended culture group. This group also had reduced diameter of the blastocysts. Supplementation with Interleukin-6 the blastocysts in extended culture showed no differences with the ones transferred at day 7 and then recovered by flushing from oviducts. This supplementation permits what appears to be normal pre-gastrulation embryonic discs.
Elizabeth Fein, Duke University, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Marbrey Lab was awarded the Campion Fund Award for the best poster at the 2026 annual meeting of the Triangle Consortium for Reproductive Biology. Her work. “Examining the effects of electronic cigarette vapor on early pregnancy initiation and embryonic development” studied the mechanisms of the previous studies in the laboratory that showed lack of implantation sites in mice exposed to electronic cigarette vapor. By exposing mice to vapor both pre and post pregnancy she found that electronic cigarette vapor decreased pre-implantation embryo number but did not affect the number of available embryos that did implant. She noted that there was an increase in post-implantation embryo development and decidualization. Furthermore, the findings showed that e-cigs might disrupt embryo distribution and spacing and increase oxidative stress in the receptive uterus.