Contact: Will Sansom, (210) 567-2579

(L-R) Dr. Francisco G. Cigarroa, M.D., president of the UT Health Science Center; stands with Ann Stevens, president of BioMed SA; Marylyn Smith, widow of Melvin D. Smith, M.D.; Dr. and Mrs. Robert M. Campbell Jr.; Dr. and Mrs. Kaye E. Wilkins; Henry Cisneros, chair of BioMed SA; and Don Beeler, president and CEO of CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Health Care, following the presentation of the awards. (Click on image to see larger view)
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SAN ANTONIO (Sept. 16, 2008) — Three internationally known pediatric surgeons were honored Sept. 16 as the 2008 recipients of the prestigious Julio Palmaz Award for Innovation in Healthcare and the Biosciences.

Kaye E. Wilkins, D.V.M., M.D., Melvin D. Smith, M.D. (deceased) and Robert M. Campbell Jr., M.D., each were honored for devising innovative ideas that have had tangible, life-saving results around the world.

Dr. Wilkins, professor of orthopedics and pediatrics at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio and staff physician in the Department of Pediatric Orthopaedics at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital, was honored for his extensive work in continuing medical education for pediatric orthopaedic surgeons in 22 countries with limited resources.

Read more about the Palmaz Award winners and their work: Dr. Kaye E. Wilkins Drs. Melvin D. Smith and Robert M. Campbell Jr.

Dr. Smith, professor of pediatric general surgery at the Health Science Center until he passed away in January 2008, and Dr. Campbell, former professor of orthopaedics at the UT Health Science Center, worked together to develop the Titanium Rib, a new medical device for children with spinal deformities. Dr. Smith was a staff physician at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital and Dr. Smith is director of the Thoracic Institute at the hospital, which serves as the Health Science Center’s academic children’s hospital.

“The biomedical innovations that come out of San Antonio continue to have a profound impact on people across the globe,” said BioMed SA Chair Henry Cisneros, a former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and four-term mayor of San Antonio. “These honorees clearly demonstrate how the science of San Antonio is saving lives around the world, in this case, the lives of young children who were either born with orthopaedic deformities or developed them as a result of trauma. Not only have these remarkable San Antonio physicians saved the lives of their own patients, they have taught other physicians and health professionals throughout the world how to perform life saving procedures.”

Continuing medical education in countries with limited resources
Dr. Wilkins’ work in continuing medical education is based on the Chinese proverb, “Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.” “It’s about leaving behind a skill that will improve humanity long term,” he said.

To that end Dr. Wilkins visited 37 countries, participated in 96 different teaching sessions, and provided 32 outreach continuing education courses in 22 countries. He taught and organized pediatric orthopaedic courses for health care workers and physicians in Shanghai, China, Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Africa, Haiti, India, Iraq, Cuba, Ecuador, Malaysia and other countries. He is also the co-author, with Dr. Charles Rockwood, of a textbook on children’s fractures which has become widely accepted throughout the world.

Earlier this year, Dr. Wilkins received the ninth annual Humanitarian Award from the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Among the many lives he has touched is that of Dr. Georges Beauvoir, a leading orthopaedic physician and educator from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who worked closely with Dr. Wilkins to establish the Haitian Clubfoot Project.

The Titanium Rib Project
What Drs. Smith and Campbell set out to do in the late 1980s was to create an artificial chest wall for a 6-month-old child born with a debilitating deformity, severe scoliosis and seven missing ribs — a child who otherwise faced almost certain death by suffocation. In saving the young boy’s life, they went on to pioneer the first new growth-sparing treatment for spinal deformities to be approved in four decades. They also characterized a previously unrecognized condition and developed six new surgical procedures, which they have trained orthopaedic surgeons around the world to perform.

Today, through the efforts of Drs. Smith and Campbell, the condition has a name, Thoracic Insufficiency Syndrome, and the breakthrough medical device developed in San Antonio, the Vertical Expandable Prosthetic Titanium Rib, has now been introduced in more than 30 countries and is considered the gold standard for treating the most fragile of pediatric patients.

Along the way, the San Antonio physicians exposed a conspicuous gap in the nation’s pediatric device development system that resulted in recent federal legislation that will revolutionize the way the Food and Drug Administration goes about approving pediatric medical devices.

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The Julio Palmaz Award for Innovation in Healthcare and the Biosciences honors individuals or organizations that have made significant contributions to advances in the health care and bioscience fields. Julio Palmaz, M.D., world-renowned inventor of the Palmaz® Stent and the Ashbel Smith Professor of Radiology at the UT Health Science Center, was the inaugural recipient and namesake of the industry award in 2006. Dr. Palmaz is widely recognized for inventing the first commercially successful intravascular stent, which gained a U.S. patent in 1988 and received FDA approval for use in cardiac arteries in 1994. The Palmaz® Stent revolutionized cardiac care, with more than a million people a year undergoing coronary artery stenting to repair clogged arteries.

BioMed SA is a nonprofit, membership-based organization, supported in part by Bexar County and the City of San Antonio. The mission of BioMed SA is to organize and promote San Antonio’s health care and biosciences assets to accelerate growth of the sector and enhance San Antonio’s reputation as a city of science and health. The city’s health care and bioscience industry has added approximately 22,000 net new jobs over the past decade, significantly fueling San Antonio’s growth and employing one out of every seven members of the city’s workforce. As America’s seventh largest city, San Antonio is a community that embraces science and medicine. Its vibrant health care and bioscience industry, a dominant force in the city’s economy with an annual economic impact exceeding $15 billion, combines unique assets and a diversity of resources with a collaborative spirit that is making a global impact on science and health.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is the leading research institution in South Texas and one of the major health sciences universities in the world. With an operating budget of $668 million, the Health Science Center is the chief catalyst for the $15.3 billion biosciences and health care sector in San Antonio’s economy. The Health Science Center has had an estimated $35 billion impact on the region since inception and has expanded to six campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. More than 23,000 graduates (physicians, dentists, nurses, scientists and other health professionals) serve in their fields, including many in Texas. Health Science Center faculty are international leaders in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, stroke prevention, kidney disease, orthopaedics, research imaging, transplant surgery, psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, pain management, genetics, nursing, dentistry and many other fields. For more information, visit www.uthscsa.edu.