The experts giving Bradford a big reputation

Less well known, perhaps, is the phoenix that arose from the ashes of that unbelievable fire: the Plastic Surgery and Burns Research Unit.

Everyone in and around Bradford knows about it. People have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to keep the unit going. Bradford City’s £100,000 Burns Unit Appeal currently stands at more than £40,000.

But the pioneering research work into the treatment of burns done by the unit, founded by Professor David Sharpe, is less well known outside Bradford.

Ten-year-old Joanne Baron escaped from the burning stand and was taken to hospital with serious burns to her scalp and left hand. Now Mrs Joanne Hill, with three children and living in Pudsey, she had special skin stretching and grafting treatment for more than two years. Her hair grew back and she got a job as a cabin crew member with the airlines Monarch and KLM.

“I would not have been able to have gone on to be cabin crew without the work of the Burns Unit. It was amazing,” she says.

An extension of the Burns Unit is Bradford University’s new Centre for Skin Sciences, a bringing together of 14 academic experts in skin and hair treatment research, plus Ph.D students and post-doctoral research fellows.

More than 30 men and women from Britain and as far afield as Iraq, Spain, India, Russia, Greece, Egypt, Germany, the United States and the Republic of Ireland, work in what is the largest academic centre of its kind in Europe. Among them are the current two research fellows of the Plastic Surgery and Burns Research Unit.

The other members of the Skin Sciences Centre work in four buildings on the expanding campus. Director of the Centre for Skin Sciences, part of the University’s School of Life Sciences, is Professor Desmond Tobin, a highly-qualified specialist in cell biology, from Ireland.

He says: “I think Bradford is not conscious of what it has got on its doorstep. But the Centre of Skin Sciences is international and multi-disciplinary in range, including computer modelling, dermatology, wound healing and skin pigmentation.

“We don’t treat people medically, the hospitals do that. Our work here directly benefits three areas: the pursuit of knowledge – clinical science; patient care – basic science; and health and well-being – personal care, beauty treatment, I suppose.”

The official launch of the new centre on May 11, also marks Bradford University’s £1.2m investment, £450,000 of which is being spent on setting up and equipping a state-of-the-art cell-sorting laboratory – one of the best in Yorkshire, according to Professor Tobin.

This week, a delegation of ten from Professor Tobin’s centre will be attending the annual meeting of the British Society for Investigative Dermatology in Edinburgh. The contribution from Bradford University will be the biggest in Britain. Another colleague is flying out to a conference in the United States.

In other words, the world expects excellence in skin science from Bradford University.

“In many ways, the fire led to wound-healing research being established via our Plastic Surgery and Burns Research Unit,” says Professor Tobin.

If that use of “our” implies taking over the unit as a form of academic empire-building, it is accidental. Both he and Professor David Sharpe went to extraordinary lengths to emphasise that the Burns Unit will retain both its autonomy and identity.

Professor Sharpe, who does part of his work at the Yorkshire Clinic in Cottingley, says: “Under the umbrella of the Centre for Skin Sciences, the unit will have academic leadership; there will be people to supervise the research fellows.”

If Bradford City’s Burns Unit Appeal exceeds its £100,000 target, as it looks like doing, David Sharpe may have enough money to appoint a new research professor for the unit.

He is scheduled to give a talk on the fire and the work of the Burns Unit at the launch of the Centre for Skin Sciences at Bradford University’s Management Centre, Heaton Mount, on Tuesday, May 11.