Mr Brian Sommerlad Consultant Plastic Surgeon and Chair of Trustees Expand For over 40 years, I have been involved in operating on babies, children and adults who have been born with cleft lip and/or palate. Although I have now retired from the National Health Service, I continue to operate both in the UK and in many countries abroad. As a plastic surgeon, I have been involved in many aspects of surgical reconstruction. However, I have increasingly focused on the challenge of trying to improve results in surgery for clefts. I have been aware of the lack of good quality data on techniques and outcomes and have tried to make some contributions in these areas. Travelling to many countries has convinced me of the need to try to help in improving care for children born with clefts in resource-poor countries. Most efforts by charities rely on flying in western teams for short visits or paying local surgeons to carry out the operations in private hospitals. Neither of these approaches builds for the future. If these NGOs disappeared, they would have had a negative impact in the long-term. In 2007, with Maddie Holmes (grandmother of a patient) and inspired by John Kettleborough (an ex-patient) we set up the charity CLEFT, with the aim of funding research to be carried out by the North Thames Cleft Team in Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the St Andrew’s Centre, Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford, and also to support cleft lip and palate teams in resource-poor countries such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Egypt and Kurdistan. We have achieved a lot but there is much more to be done – helping to bridge the gaps in knowledge about the causes and treatment of clefts and trying to bridge the gaps between treatment in countries like the UK and countries like Bangladesh. In addition to being the current chairman of CLEFT, I am currently trying to split my time between looking after my own patients, regularly visiting the centres that we support overseas, and also keeping in touch with my own family of five children and currently thirteen grandchildren. It would be better if there were more hours in the day and more days in the year!
Mr Paul Morris Plastic Surgeon Expand I am a paediatric plastic surgeon with a specialist interest in cleft lip and palate surgery at Great Ormond Street (GOSH) for the last 8 years. Just as with my wife Tracy, both work and home life are full of all things cleft! Through sharing my expertise I've been fortunate enough to train cleft surgeons at GOSH, who are now consultant cleft surgeons in the U.K. and around the world (Belgium, Canada and Chile). Most recently sharing my expertise in the management of cleft children with clinical teams from developing countries, including Bangladesh, has enabled CLEFT to support their local care of cleft children and families. In addition to surgical training, I am a keen cyclist and coordinate a team for CLEFT to participate in the annual Prudential 100 mile cycle ride in London It is a wonderful family weekend event that has raised significant amount of money and awareness for CLEFT. My aim for this coming year is to increase the number of cleft families that engage with CLEFT so that we can raise awareness, share the good work we do and of course get more families involved in fund raising activities.
Dr Malcolm Birch Medical Physicist Expand I first became involved with cleft patients here at The London Hospital, as it was then, back in the 90’s. I worked with the head of Speech and Language Therapy, developing an instrument to help to test the aspects of the quality of speech as therapy progressed. This instrument, along with analysis of movement of the soft palate during speech, became my PhD project that I successfully completed in 1995. Since then the collaboration with Brian Sommerlad has continued to this day and has now moved into the use of MRI to assess palatal function. CLEFT have been tremendously supportive to this research effort. Specifically, the charity has funded a PhD studentship that was completed in 2018 and that work has substantially improved our understanding of how MRI is best applied in the clinical assessment of the cleft palate.
Professor Phil Stanier Research Scientist Expand I am a research scientist with a particular interest in studying the molecular and genetic basis that leads to a cleft of the lip and/or palate. I joined UCL’s Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in 2006,which was an ideal opportunity to work closely with the North Thames Cleft team. Understanding the causes of cleft lip and palate is highly complicated since it involves many different genes and environmental risk factors, that sometimes interact together. My team, in collaboration with many researchers worldwide, have uncovered some of the key genetic and epigenetic factors that can lead to a cleft. We continue to try to understand how these impact on normal fetal development with a view to improving diagnosis, treatment and prevention. I have been closely involved with the CLEFT charity as a member of the Research Steering group since 2007.
Mr Paolo di Coppi NIHR, Nuffield Chair of Paediatric Surgery Expand 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 for Children and the Head of Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Section, Developmental Biology& Cancer Programme at the UCL Institute of Child Health, London, UK. Paolo De Coppi is also an Honorary Professor at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, US; and at the Division Woman and Child, University Hospitals KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. He has a special interest in congenital malformation and their treatment using minimally invasive techniques. He has focused his research interests on stem cells and tissue engineering, trying to find new modalities for the treatment of complex congenital anomalies. He identified a new source of cells for therapeutic applications showing the possibility of using stem cells from amniotic fluid (cover Nature Biotechnology January 2007). More recently, he has described methods to decellularised several organs and tissue such as the intestine, liver, pancreas, kidney 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 (Lancet, 2012). Recently he has developed innovative methodologies to utilise xenogeneic tissue for transplantation using decellularised pig tissue for human compatible tissue engineered oesophagus (PNAS, 2013). For his research he has received funding from MRC, NIHR, Wellcome Trust and the EU programme Horizon 2020. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as The Lancet, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications, PNAS, Blood and Stem Cells; supervised more than 30 research fellow and Ph.D. students; and has been awarded various national and international grants in excess of £23 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.