Mr Atheer Ujam is a Oral Maxillofacial Consultant who undertook his PhD at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. Mr Ujam focused his project on “Cartilage Engineering from Autologous Fat for Oro-Facial Deformity Reconstruction – Focus on the Nose.” Saving Faces part-funded Mr Ujam’s PhD.

This project aimed to engineer a cartilage-like product that could be inserted into paediatric patients with nasal deformity as a result of tumour resection, post traumatic or congenital deformity. This novel product would reconstruct normal function and aesthetics of the nose by utilizing stem cell technology to generate missing nasal cartilage, and could replace current surgical techniques that use costochondral rib grafts to replace missing or deformed nasal cartilage. 3D printing technology was used to fabricate the nasal product.

Mr Ujam PhD thesis can be found here.

Applications are invited from BAOMS members / Fellows in training for a research fellowship in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMFS). The fellowship will cover the salary and on-costs of a clinical researcher up to £43,000 plus a small research support grant of up to £3,000.

The applicant should hold dual medical and dental qualifications and ideally have a National Training Number in OMFS.

Applicants will have a strong publication record. Applications are considered on the basis of the applicant’s academic achievements and potential, the scientific merit of the research proposal, and the research environment provided by the sponsoring department.

Please note the deadline for applications has now passed. Details of the next fellowship will be made available on both the Saving Faces and BAOMS website.

Jag Dhanda is a BAOMS/Saving Faces – FSRF Head and Neck Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Here he answers some questions about his work.

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Interim report for the BAOMS/FSRF-Saving Faces Joint Fellowship

Summary of Research

Oral cancer is the commonest type of head and neck cancer and remains a debilitating and devastating disease. Its incidence is growing in the UK and advances in the management of this disease have made little impact on the overall survival for the condition.  The most adverse factor for survival in oral cancer is extracapsular spread (ECS). In this instance the disease spreads from the mouth to lymph nodes in the neck and subsequently spills out from these lymph nodes.

Biopsy tissue was collected from 110 patients with oral cancer at University Hospital Aintree in Liverpool, one of the largest head and neck cancer referral centres in the UK. This tissue was used to determine the important molecular events in the development of ECS.  Clinical data from patient follow-up after surgery confirmed the dire consequences of ECS. The findings were comparable with a larger previous study in which less than one quarter of the patients with ECS survived after 5 years.

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