- Foreword
- Message from Board Chair & Chief Executive
- 2023 Clinical Research Fellowships
- A message from the RBWH Foundation
- A message from The Common Good
- Metro North Research Excellence Awards
- Research stories
- ICU of the Future
- New approach ruling out pulmonary embolism
- Improving access to healthcare in the prison environment
- Safety and efficacy of peripheral versus centrally administered vasopressor infusion
- COVID-19 learnings set to inform future policy
- Telomere study could provide key to treating debilitating lung disease
- Productive Ward – Releasing time to care
- Brain organoids to revolutionise epilepsy treatment
- Reducing weight stigma in maternity care
- Parkinson’s Disease Check-In program giving people a voice
- Trial brings new treatment for common heart condition
- Teledentistry study shows promise in residential aged care
- Research fellow to boost Oral Health evidence-based care
- Study explores best approach to surgery for painful shoulder osteoarthritis
- The development and pilot testing of a stroke telerehabilitation decision toolkit
- Metro North Health delivers world-first breast scaffold surgery
- Regenerative jawbone hard at work care of collaborative Metro North Health approach
- Jamieson Trauma Institute leads e-scooter and e-bike injury research to drive community safety
- Forgotten fathers in pregnancy and obstetrics
- Putting the Spotlight on nursing and midwifery research
- Improving the health self-efficacy of stroke survivors
Metro North Health delivers world-first breast scaffold surgery
Professor Owen Ung and Dr Michael Wagels played leading roles in the world first breast scaffolding surgery
A world-first surgery delivered by Metro North Health is paving the way for women globally requiring breast reconstruction with a safer alternative to silicone implants, leaving them with nothing but their own natural tissue within two years.
The revolutionary procedure, based on decades of research, saw first clinical trial patient Moana Staunton have her silicone implants removed and replaced with a 3D printed bioresorbable scaffold, which was injected with her own fat cells.
The scaffold, made from a 3D printed medical-grade polycaprolactone-PCL which will completely dissolve and metabolise in the body, was finessed between Metro North Health and German medtech company BellaSeno for months before being printed in Germany and sent to Brisbane for Moana’s procedure.
Director of the Comprehensive Breast Cancer Institute Owen Ung and Director of the Herston Biofabrication Institute Michael Wagels, both Metro North Health surgeons, joined forces for the ground-breaking procedure which was undertaken on 23 June 2022.
Together, the institutes and treating teams are currently in Phase One of clinical trials, where other women have joined Moana in receiving the successful surgery.
Metro North Health’s Phase One clinical trial will recruit 15-20 eligible patients and will run until they each have received two years of follow up.