Fiona Wood
Fiona Wood is a plastic surgeon working in Perth, Western Australia. Wood is the director of the Royal Perth Hospital burns unit and the Western Australia Burns Service. In addition, Dr Fiona Wood is also a Clinical Professor with the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Western Australia and Director of the McComb Research Foundation. She was named Australian of the Year for 2005 by Australian Prime Minister John Howard at a ceremony in Canberra to mark Australia Day.
A graduate of St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in London, Fiona worked at a major British hospital before marrying Western Australian born surgeon Tony Keirath and migrating to Perth with their first two children in 1987. She completed her training in plastic surgery between having four more children.
She has become world renowned for her patented invention of spray on skin for burns victims, a treatment which is continually developing. Where previous techniques of skin culturing required 21 days to produce enough cells to cover major burns, Fiona has reduced that period to five days. Via her research, Fiona found that scarring is greatly reduced if replacement skin could be provided within 10 days. As a burns specialist the holy grail for Dr Fiona Wood is ‘scarless woundless healing'.[1]
In October 2002, Fiona was propelled into the media spotlight when the largest proportion of survivors from the 2002 Bali bombings arrived at Royal Perth Hospital. She led a courageous and committed team in the fight to save 28 patients suffering from between two and 92 per cent body burns, deadly infections and delayed shock.
As well as receiving much praise from both her own patients and the media, she also attracted controversy among other burns surgeons due to the fact that spray-on skin had not yet been subjected to clinical trials[2][3]. A clinical trial is planned at Queen Victoria Hospital, England.[4]
She has started a company called Clinical Cell Culture (C3) to commercialise this procedure. Her business came about after a schoolteacher arrived at Royal Perth Hospital in 1992 with petrol burns to 90% of his body. Fiona turned to the emerging US-invented technology of cultured skin to save his life, working nights in a laboratory borrowed from scientist Marie Stoner. A friendship developed, and the two women joined forces to explore tissue engineering. They moved from growing skin sheets to spraying skin cells; earning a world-wide reputation as pioneers in their field. The company started operating in 1993 and is now planning to release its technology globally to use the royalties to fund further burns research.