Clinical Professor Fiona Wood’s Story

Clinical Professor Fiona Wood is renowned for her invention of spray on skin cells for burns patients She is also the mother of six children She and her family live in City Beach

Fiona aged 6

I was born on 2nd February 1958 I was the third child in our family. I had two older brothers and eventually got a younger sister I grew up in Yorkshire where my parents still live I went to the local school initially My mother worked in a Quaker school and I was able to go there as a staff child when I was 13. I was there for five years It was a pivotal time in my life because I was able to achieve more than I if I’d stayed in the Comprehensive School System that did not go past GCE level

Numbers were my game from a very early stage Numbers were my game from a very early stage. I was fascinated by maths and physics When I was 16 I was interested in doing maths and physics at uni but my brother and my mother thought medicine would be better. My mother said if you’re a doctor you will always have a job and be financially independent of the male! I heard that many times

Fiona trained as a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London ‘I always worked because we were means tested and on full grants. We had our fees and books paid and a living allowance but it was never quite enough so we always worked. It was starve or…work.’ She married Australian-born Tony Kierath and with their two children, migrated to Australia in 1987

‘I was overwhelmed by the sunniness … Coming from the frozen north when it’s grey one day and grey the next and dark the next day… Is there a sun??? We’d arrived in the middle of the night and I remember waking my husband up the next morning at five o’clock and saying, “hey wake up, we’re going for a walk” and he said “why?” And I said “cos the sun’s shining!’ And he groaned and said, “it will be for the next 365 days!”

‘I am a wife, a mother, a surgeon and scientist… Fiona insists any success is down to team work Fiona’s greatest challenge hasn’t been her ground-breaking scientific research, but motherhood ‘Having your first child is the biggest life change. You can’t really prepare for that Going from five to six isn’t such a problem’

Fiona Wood has two recurring characteristics: She has genuine humility and a relentless positive attitude ‘I’ve got a lot of energy. My daily routine starts at 5a.m. and often I go to bed at midnight’ Through her enthusiasm, innovation and vision, Fiona has saved and improved countless people’s lives She is an inspiration

Left to Right : Katrina, Fiona, Gillian and Beth 1993

Working with burns victims… Even relatively small burns can be extraordinarily devastating from a psychological as well as physical point of view Burns are devastating It is a life-defining point You lay in that bed hour after hour… in pain We try very hard to give the best possible care

Fiona with a survivor of severe burns and his wife, 1993

Peter Hughes, survivor of the Bali bombing says, ‘When I woke up, I just couldn’t believe it. I thought “no human being should go through this” I screamed and cried…’ Clinical Professor Wood says ‘we do positive things to reduce the time that burn patients have to suffer… We try and get the healing process working as soon as possible The sooner we can the less trauma and the better the recovery’

Spray-on skin cells ‘We’ve been working on spray-on skin cells since the early 90’s We take a little bit of skin from a normal area … skin that knows how to regenerate It knows how to repair without a scar We take the sample of healthy cells and feed them for five days in a tissue culture flask Then we spray them onto the body and the body is then the tissue culture flask

‘Every operation a person has is another bad day in the burns unit If we can reduce the number of operations… we reduce the pain and suffering that’s associated with it and also reduce the scarring Speed is very important for scarring’

Previous techniques of skin culturing required 21 days Fiona and her team have reduced that period to five days Fiona has found that scarring is greatly reduced if replacement skin can be provided within 10 days Fiona’s holy grail is scarless healing

Fiona Wood, AM Australian of the Year 2005 ‘I am proud to be an Australian and will work towards a society dependent on the integrity of each other.’