£10m awarded for foetal surgery research

Surgeons will be able to use better tools, imaging techniques and therapies in future operations on unborn babies due to a £10 million award from the Wellcome Trust and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) to develop these technologies. Pioneered in the 1980s, surgery on unborn babies has been shown to be effective to treat conditions arising before birth like spina bifida, where a lesion on the back leaves the spinal cord exposed in the womb, and twin-twin transfusion syndrome, where blood passes unequally between twins who share a placenta. Now, research led by engineers at UCL and KU Leuven in Belgium will develop novel imaging techniques that can be used before and during surgery to visualise blood circulation, enabling surgeons to better plan and perform operations on unborn babies with severe birth defects. In addition to working on surgical imaging techniques, the team will develop new instruments to improve the flexibility and precision of the surgeon, as well as adaptations to deliver stem cell therapies to the unborn baby in the womb. A training platform will also be developed that will enable surgeons to gain the necessary skills before operating on pregnant mothers. Around one in a hundred babies are born with a severe birth defect, and collectively these are estimated to be responsible for over a third of all paediatric hospital admissions and up to a half of the total cost of paediatric hospital treatment. Birth defects are usually detected prenatally by screening with ultrasound and some of these can benefit from surgical correction because therapy cannot wait until after birth.