Fiona Wood, C3 co-founder, named Australian of the Year

Plastic surgeon Prof Fiona Wood, co-founder of Perth-based biotech Clinical Cell Culture (ASX:CCE), has been honoured for her role in developing a living spray-on skin to treat burns victims by being named the 2005 Australian of the Year.

Wood is also a clinical professor with the School of Paediatrics and Child Health Care at the University of WA, and director of the McComb Research Foundation.

Born in the UK, Wood migrated to Perth with her family in 1987 -- she is married to WA surgeon Tony Keirath, with whom she has six children.

She was propelled into the public spotlight after the Bali bombing in October, 2002 when she led a medical team at the Royal Perth Hospital (RPH) which treated 28 victims evacuated from Bali, some of them with burns to up to 92 per cent of their bodies. Most were treated with Clinical Cell Culture's spray-on skin.

She helped found the company after a schoolteacher was admitted to RPH in 1992 with petrol burns to 90 per cent of his body.

Wood helped to save his life by using a relatively new US technology to growing sheets of the patient's own skin in tissue culture. Later, she and a scientist colleague, Marie Stoner, moved from growing skin in culture to spraying suspensions of cultured skin cells on burns, that proliferated and grow in situ.

Clinical Cell Culture (C3) began operating in 1993, to commercialise the patented spray-on-skin technology. Last year the company announced it was moving its headquarters to Cambridge, after gaining approval from the British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to market its Cellspray and Cellspray XP products in the UK.

One of Wood's major achievements was to reduce the time taken to culture a patient's skin cells from 21 days to just five days -- her research showed that if she could replace a patient's skin within 10 days of the original burn, healing is more rapid, greatly reducing scarring.

The company has also developed a device, called Recell, that enables surgeons to harvest healthy skin cells from patients and apply them directly to small wounds and burns.