Fiona Wood: ‘When I’ve got a bee in my bonnet, I don’t give up’
When Fiona Wood moved to Perth from the UK in 1987, she was drawn to its wildlife. “Intrinsically, it’s the most beautiful place,” she says, as we wander along Matilda Bay beneath a canopy of foliage, the gnarled trunks of moreton bay figs and cape lilacs with their bursts of yellow berries. “When I first came here, I thought, ‘I can see myself sitting under these trees with my thinking cap on’.”
Almost 40 years later, she’s certainly done her share of thinking on these grounds. Just across the road from Matilda Bay is the University of Western Australia, where Wood has worked since in the early ‘90s, first as a senior lecturer, then a professor in the school of surgery and director of the Burn Injury Research Unit. “I’m part of the furniture there,” she tells me in her warm, lilting Yorkshire-cum-Australian accent.
Wood has worn many hats over her 30-year career: plastic surgeon, clinician scientist, burns specialist, researcher, mentor. But like many scientists, she remains fixated on her next discovery – that elusive eureka moment, a chance to push the boundaries of medical knowledge into new realms. Interviewing her is like submitting to a stream of scientific cogitation laced with self-deprecating humour. It’s dizzyingly fast, and totally captivating.
“My staff laugh at me because I’m always trying to connect the dots – I’ll go into meetings and my brain will be scanning the horizon for ideas. They say ‘sometimes we join dots that shouldn’t be joined!’” she tells me, dissolving into laughter. “But I’m not shy when I’m wrong. There’s no such thing as a bad decision, as long as you learn from it.”
Wood is best known for “sprayon skin”, a groundbreaking invention which uses a patient’s own skin cells to form a new layer of skin over a burn wound, greatly reducing scarring. She used this technology to aid the recovery of the 28 Bali bombings victims whose lives were saved in 2002, a feat that saw Wood named a Member of the Order of Australia the following year. Twenty years later, in January 2024, she was honoured with Officer of the Order of Australia for her distinguished service to burns medicine.
The AO joins a raft of roles and accolades Wood has amassed over her prolific career. In addition to her position at UWA, she’s a consultant plastic surgeon at Perth children’s hospital and Fiona Stanley hospital, director of the WA Burns Service, a National Living Treasure, former Australian of the Year and a mother of six.
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As we stroll along the river past peppermint trees and a family of black swans, Wood tells me about her current fixation. She’s working to find a solution for the “scarring triangle” – the physical, psychological and physiological changes in some burns victims that make them more vulnerable to future infection, illness and even death.
This long-term research project draws on Wood’s “burn injury biobank”, the world’s largest collection of biological samples from child and adult burn victims, amassed over time to enable longitudinal studies. There are a handful of topics that get Wood really excited, and this is one of them – if all goes to plan, the biobank and its data platform will allow her team to uncover the pathways to secondary illness, and deliver tailored, individual medical care in ways that have never been done before.
“Tailored medicine, precision medicine. That’s the future,” Wood says, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. “But how do we actually do it? We need an enormous amount of information so we know where you sit on this massive spectrum, whether it be your lipids or your metabolites, your amino acids, your DNA – which requires huge mathematical capability and machine learning.”
“We’re inching closer,” she continues, clenching her first determinedly. “It’s’ ‘batten down the hatches, get a little bit more money, keep going’.”
There was one patient in particular who set her off on this line of inquiry. In 2003, Wood saved the life of a seven-year-old boy who suffered significant burns in a farming accident. Three years later, he died of a rare liver cancer.
“I was told at the time it was just bad luck,” she says. “And that didn’t sit well with me. I can nag for the UK and Australia, and when I’ve got a bee in my bonnet, I don’t give up.”
Since 2010, Wood and her team have published more than 30 studies investigating the links between burn injury and lifetime risk of cancer, inflammatory diseases, mental health and other pathologies – demonstrating that there is indeed a correlation. Their next step is to figure out why.
“We’re very much in the weeds at the moment. We’re looking in the brain, we’re looking at the immune system and we’re looking at the inflammatory profile. If we can figure out who is vulnerable and why and what is the mechanism, then we can start to treat it.”
We sit down on a bench beneath the shade of a soaring lemon-scented gum, to get some respite from the heat.
It’s already a sticky 29C at 8:30am, and a thick haze of cloud hangs overhead. Wood tells me about the work she’s been doing in exploring the role of the mind in burn recovery, and how neurology might enable us to “think ourselves whole”.
While the idea might seem outlandish to some, Wood believes neurology could be the holy grail of burns medicine. Currently, very little is known about the brain’s response to serious burns but, as with many of the great mysteries in her research, this only serves to propel her forward.
“We’re experimenting with transcranial magnetic stimulation,” she says. “Many people have started to use this technique in depression and post-stroke rehabilitation, but to understand how we can use neuroplasticity to enable burn recovery would be a huge step forward.”
The conversation continues to chart an astounding breadth of scientific thinking, with Wood navigating effortlessly between regenerative medicine, artificial intelligence and biotechnology – just a few of the new frontiers she’s got her sights on.
Among them, Wood is making progress with a series of new world-first surgery tools. The 3D bioprinter produces cells which replace the dermis, the complex secondary skin layer, to provide a “more complete skin reconstruction”. Wood believes it’ll be ready for a human pilot study in the middle of this year.
Also in development, the iKnife is a new tool which will enable surgeons to distinguish between live and dead tissue, one of the biggest challenges of burn wound surgery. “I’m so excited by this project, it’s going to put my retirement back years,” Wood says. “I think it’s paradigm shifting, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Further down the line, Wood and her team will explore options for commercialisation, much like they did for spray-on skin, which was brought to market by Avita Medical. While the company was founded by Wood, she does not own it, and any royalties collected are channelled back into research.
We make our way back towards UWA, where she has her next meeting. Breaks are few and far between for the indefatigable Wood, who spends her days scurrying between the university, Fiona Stanley hospital and Perth children’s hospital. As we stroll along the riverfront, I ask her about the many patients she has saved from life-threatening injury, and what it feels like to see them make a full recovery.
“There was a woman, a triathlete, who sustained shocking burns from the Bali bombings,” she tells me. “When she woke from her coma, she asked me ‘I won’t run, will I ever walk again?’ and I said, ‘you will walk, you will run, you will race’.”
Amazingly, the woman beat Wood in an ironman in Busselton a few years later. “There wasn’t a dry eye as we hugged over the finish line that day.”
We cross the road over to the towering limestone buildings of UWA, a second home for Wood for the last three decades. “You know, it wasn’t until about ten years after the Bali bombings that I realised, maybe I have some vicarious trauma because I found it really challenging to talk about,” she says.
Wood treated 31 survivors of the 2002 blast, who were flown to Royal Perth hospital suffering up to 90% body burns, deadly infections and delayed shock. Her team of 19 surgeons and 130 medical staff worked around the clock to save them. But she lost three patients, and their deaths have never left her.
“There are people that I will never forget, and there are situations that are harrowing, and they’re part of me. The only way I know how to cope is to aggressively engage in this research, to keep discovering.”
“And somewhere along the line, we will change things and we will change them for the better.”