Building organs for surgery

Paolo De Coppi is the Nuffield Chair of Paediatric Surgery, the NIHR Professor of Paediatric Surgery and Consultant Paediatric Surgeon at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. He is the Head of the Surgery Unit, Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Section, Developmental Biology& Cancer Programme at the UCL Great Ormond Institute of Child Health. In 2020 he has become the first Paediatric Surgeon to be elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Professor De Coppi trained at Boston Children’s Hospital, the Academic Medical Center (Amsterdam, NL) and Padua University (Italy), and has a special interest in congenital malformations and their treatment using minimally invasive techniques. He is a patron for TOFS and CDHUK and has focused his research interests on stem cells and tissue engineering by trying to find new modalities for the treatment of complex congenital anomalies.

He identified stem cells from amniotic fluid and he has described methods to decellularised several organs and tissue such as the kidney, intestine, liver, pancreas, and lung. In 2010 he was part of the team that performed the first successful transplantation of a tissue-engineered trachea on a child at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. He has published more than 350 peer-reviewed articles (h-index 65) in journals such as Nature, Nature Biotechnology, The Lancet, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, and Cells Stem Cells; supervised more than 35 research fellow and Ph.D. students; and has been awarded various national and international grants in excess of £30 million. He is on the editorial boards of Stem Cell Development, Journal of Pediatric Surgery, Pediatric Surgery International, and Fetal and Maternal Medicine Review. As of 2011 he has been the senior associate editor for Stem Cell Translational Medicine.

Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.