strawberry birthmark

Hutt Hospital's director of surgery should be happy enough – because what began as his research into disfiguring strawberry birthmarks has just won his four-strong research team a major international science prize. That Tan and his team have done their breakthrough research without such facilities and with little funding is testimony to their dedication – and their willingness to spend huge amounts of time working for free. He won a fellowship to Oxford to do further training in craniofacial surgery – "you cut out eye sockets and move them, basically" – and to Harvard Medical School to do research. It was his boss there – John Mulliken, the man for whom the prize is named – who got him interested in strawberry birthmarks, or haemangioma. To fund this research he also set up a private practice – doing cosmetic as well as reconstructive surgery. But Tan's most significant discovery was the origin of strawberry birthmarks – stem cells – and the way these cells are controlled. So just think about this concept of fighting a tumour with an anti-hypertensive drug – to manipulate the Renin-Angiotensin system – instead of using chemotherapy. It was the research on the Renin-Angiotensin system and strawberry birthmarks that won the international science prize for Tan and his team – Darren Day and PhD student Tinte Itinteang from Victoria University's School of Biomedical Sciences, where the lab work is done, and Hutt Hospital pathologist Helen Brasch. Itinteang – from Kiribati via scholarships to St Patrick's College, Silverstream and the University of Melbourne Medical School – was supposed to present that paper in Belgium. The first significant move towards putting the institute on the drawing board came in 1998 when Tan's old boss at Oxford asked if his top student could help with the research – and Tan had to turn him down because it was unpaid. After some wine they got really happy and I said, 'I've got this idea – a charitable trust to raise mone�y and invest it, and then we can carry on the research.'" Those guests and their host formed the Reconstructive Plastic Surgery Research Foundation to fund a research fellow position. His professorship is from the University of Otago's Wellington School of Medicine, which has set up a chair of plastic surgery at the Gillies McIndoe Research Institute – and appointed him to it. strawberry birthmark strawberry birthmark