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    4.  : Silvana Perretta: Legion of Honor and project on Covid-19 reduction in surgery

Silvana Perretta: Legion of Honor and project on Covid-19 reduction in surgery

26 January 2021

Silvana Perretta, a former Fellow of USIAS (2017-2020), was named Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honour on 1 January 2021. She is one of the four foreign personalities who currently reside in France to receive this distinction in 2021. 

Professor Perretta is one of the pioneers in the development of transluminal endoscopic surgery through natural orifices (NOTES), hybrid surgical endoscopy procedures and medical education by MOOCs worldwide. She is vice president of the Institute for Research against Digestive Cancer (IRCAD), director of Teaching at the Institute of Image-Guided Surgery (IHU), and responsible for the bariatric and metabolic endoscopy programme at the University Hospitals of Strasbourg.

Recently, Professor Perretta has become active in the area of reducing the risk of Covid-19 transmission during surgery. She is a partner in PORSAV, an 18- month rapid consortium project, which was awarded a grant from the European Commission in October 2020. The aim of the project is to develop new technology to protect surgeons and patients against Covid-19 during surgery. The project, led by the Irish medical technology company Palliare in collaboration with University College Dublin (UCD), the Polish medical device manufacturer SteriPack and IRCAD, has received €2.4 million in funding from the European Commission. 

The project will examine the nature and extent of unintentional gas leakage during laparoscopic surgery and flexible endoscopy, where the aerosolization of body fluids poses a high risk to healthcare workers. Its objective is to develop two new medical devices to manage and filter these leaks at the source, and to enable the mass production and distribution of these devices to Covid-19 surgical and medical healthcare teams worldwide. Professor Silvana Perretta and her colleague, Professor Bernard Dallemagne, will lead one of the two trials at IRCAD and use this new technology and information to train surgeons around the world how to reduce the risks associated with Covid-19 in operating rooms. This technology will have other related applications beyond the pandemic, both in medicine and in other areas.

 

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