You wouldn’t expect the story of a scientific breakthrough to involve aerosol paint and airbrushes. And yet, the making of spray-on skin – a regenerative treatment that heals burns with less scarring than traditional grafts – sent Professor Fiona Wood AO and her co-inventor, Marie Stoner, hightailing to the art shop. 

It was the early 90s and the Perth-based duo – Fiona, a plastic surgeon, and scientist Marie – were taking healthy skin from patients and growing skin cells in their laboratory. 

Initially, they’d grown and applied new cells to wounds in sheet form, in a process that took several weeks. But they’d discovered that cells suspended in a liquid solution had a better success rate – and could be grown and applied to a patient in a matter of days. 

“Then we figured well, we need to get these on [to the wound] somehow,” says Fiona, who was then, as she is now, Director of the Burns Service of Western Australia. 

“We came up with the idea of spraying it on, and we went down to the pharmacy and the art store and we got everything that sprayed.”

Nose sprays, throat sprays and airbrushing kits were put to the test. 

“We did a whole series of experiments and we found a nozzle that, when clipped onto a five mil syringe, retained more than 90 percent viability [of the skin cells] coming through the system. So that was a eureka moment.”

Fiona’s product has helped thousands of people across the globe.

Born in a small coal town in Yorkshire, England, Fiona began her medical career in London. After relocating with her Australian husband and their young family (the pair now have six adult children), she became the first female plastic surgeon in WA. 

Fiona and her spray-on-skin technology gained international attention following the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, in Kuta. Leading a team at Royal Perth Hospital, Fiona worked with 19 surgeons and 130 medical staff to treat 28 of the most severely injured victims – and ensure the best outcomes for the 25 who survived.

The following year, Fiona was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her contributions to plastic and reconstructive surgery and medical research. Her many awards also include being named Australian of the Year for 2005 and, in 2024, becoming an Officer of the Order of Australia. 

But these accolades came long after she and Marie founded their biotechnology company, Clinical Cell Culture (now Avita Medical) in 1993, around the time they went trawling pharmacies and art shops, hunting for the perfect nozzle. 

“We were spraying by Christmas of 1994 … And then we started to spray cells on quicker and quicker and quicker until we put the basic elements of the tissue engineering process into a box – and took the box to the bedside.” 

As Fiona saw spray-on-skin – branded as RECELL – dramatically reduce permanent scarring in her burns patients, she and Marie travelled to Geneva for a conference on cultured skin for wound care. Here, the so-called world-expert in the field was a speaker and had used his technology to treat 29 cases.

“At that time, we’d treated more than 300,” says Fiona.   

“When he was presenting, we realised what we were doing was very different. But we’d kind of got an inkling of that before we left – to the point that we knew that if we presented our work before we protected it, we would not be able to protect it.” 

In 1993, Fiona and Marie had applied for a provisional patent. This is an optional first step in the patenting process that, ideally, ends with a patent – a legal right that gives an inventor exclusive use of a new, inventive and useful invention. 

“And so we put in a provisional patent … but we made the mistake of doing it on the fly with the insight of a gnat,” says Fiona. “We didn’t understand the whole game plan.”  

The process behind applying for this patent looked like cold-calling a lawyer and paying them a couple of thousand dollars to file it. 

“Then it sort of sat there, because we didn’t have the understanding of the next steps … You take one step, but you’re actually in a marathon – more like an ultramarathon – and at the time we had no concept of that at all,” says Fiona.

“We lost that first patent because we weren’t in a space where we understood the commercialisation process in a timely fashion. We had to come back to it when we’d done more work and we were more savvy.”

For their next attempt, Fiona and Marie called on their networks and found a patent lawyer who would take them from start to finish.  

“We wanted to use royalties to keep us alive – to keep us doing the research – and it’s worked.”

“And like he was like, ‘right, I need to sit you guys down. You haven’t a clue’. And we said, ‘well, that’s hardly surprising. We just had the ideas’,” says Fiona.

“That’s why having education in this space is a very good plan. But failing that, having links with people who know the space. So that was our second bite of the cherry – it was much more comprehensive and thought out, with the right support in place – and that one actually stuck.”

Part of the commercial strategy behind this patent was the creation of The Fiona Wood Foundation. Originally called the McComb Foundation after Fiona’s plastic surgery mentor, Professor Harold McComb, this not-for-profit exists to advance scarless healing. And it owns all of the intellectual property (IP) around RECELL. 

“I signed my intellectual properties there because my motivation for commercialisation was to facilitate the research. We wanted to use royalties to keep us alive – to keep us doing the research – and it’s worked.”

As Fiona’s care of the Bali bombing victims made global headlines, in 2002, RECELL got its Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approval and Conformité Européenne (CE) mark, signaling a roll out of spray-on-skin technology across Europe.  

“Build a team around you that you trust.”

Securing global patents was, Fiona explains, a “long and hard journey” made possible by the team she built behind Avita Medical.

“They did a grand job over the years and kept at it until we got FDA [US Food and Drug Administration] approval in 2018, which was a real landmark,” she says.

“Christmas of 2018, just after FDA approval, I had an email from my colleague in the US with a picture of a little girl. She had been burned, he had sprayed the cells on, and she had recovered beautifully. My colleague’s message was, ‘Merry Christmas, because you made her Christmas’. And I will always remember that.” 

Generally speaking, patents have a 20 year lifespan. And while some of the protections placed around RECELL have now expired, Fiona continues to develop her technology.

“I think if other people do RECELL, that’s fine and grand, because the more people can use it, the better,” she says. 

“It’s got to be within the context of maintaining quality and capability … but if you get lookalike products then it’s actually validation, in my view. And the smart money is to keep ahead of the game.”  

Fiona’s advice for others who want to get their innovations out there is: don’t go at it alone.

“That’s the first thing – understanding you’ll have to share it,” she says. “And the second thing is to build a team around you that you trust.”