Professor Paolo De Coppi is a Consultant Paediatric Surgeon at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the Head of the Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at the UCL Institute of Child Health both located in London, England. Concomitantly, from 2009 he has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina and from 2005 he has been an Honorary Assistant Professor in pediatric surgery, University of Padua, Italy.

Professor De Coppi has a special interest in congenital malformations and their treatment using minimally invasive techniques. He has focused his research interests on stem cells and tissue engineering with the aim of finding new modalities for the treatment of complex congenital anomalies. While working with Anthony Atala, M.D., at the Boston Children's Hospital (Massachusetts), he identified the possibility of using stem cells from amniotic fluid for therapeutic applications, a finding which has opened the door to discovery for novel approaches to correct congenital malformations, generated an international patent and garnered the cover story of Nature Biotechnology January 2007. More recently, he and his team demonstrated that these cells can differentiate into various tissues, replacing functional activity in animal model of diseases, and is now focused on developing reliable methods for stem cell isolation, expansion and differentiation at a clinical level (GMP-grade). In 2010, he was part of the team that performed the first successful transplantation of a tissue-engineered trachea on a child at the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

• Neonatal and paediatric surgery
• Keyhole surgery
• Tissue engineering and major reconstructions
• Fundoplication
• Appendicectomy

• Hernia
• Undescended testes
• Oesophageal atresia
• Diaphragmatic hernia