A journey in surgical advanced therapeutic medicinal products: tissue engineered airway trials

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds lecture series, Professor Martin Birchall from University College London will present ‘A journey in surgical advanced therapeutic medicinal products: tissue engineered airway trials’.

Professor Birchall is an Otolaryngologist, and Head and Neck Surgeon specialising in the management of disorders of the head and neck, voice and swallowing. Since his Fellowship in head and neck surgery in Australia in the early 1990’s, he has been committed to the pursuit of new ways of restoring normal quality of life to patients with diseases of the head and neck. He developed a decellularised biologic tissue combined with autologous cells and stem cells (either differentiated or undifferentiated), culminating in the world’s first stem cell based organ transplant in an adult (Lancet, 2008) and in a child (unpublished, March, 2010). In October, 2010, he performed the world’s first combined laryngeal and tracheal transplant with surgeons at the University of California Davis in a Californian woman who is now talking well. He was named Daily Telegraph-Morgan Stanley Briton of the Year for Science and Technology in 2009 and he is UCL Partners Programme Director for ENT. He has received a Silver National Excellence Award in 2010, was a past President of the Otorhinolaryngological Research Society and British Association of Academics in Otolaryngology, a Council member of the European Laryngological Society and of the European Group for Functional Laryngectomy, and was elected to the American Broncho-Esophagological Association in 2009. He is Professor of Laryngology and Director of the UCLPartners academic Health Science Centre’s ENT Programme.