University of Sheffield orthopaedics professor and researcher, Mark Wilkinson, has been internationally recognised with the 2021 Fellowship Award from the Orthopaedic Research Society of the United States.
He becomes one of only two in the UK to win the award, which is the highest honour the society can bestow on its 5000 members.
On his achievement, Wilkinson said: “The award was a great honour and a privilege, it’s a really humbling recognition of my contribution in the field.
“This award is a credit to Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, the University of Sheffield and the many research collaborators I have worked with, and excellent recognition of the exceptional clinical and academic facilities we have here in Sheffield.”
Wilkinson’s achievements within his field are intellectually daunting to say the least. He is president of the British Orthopaedics Research Society, leads the National Joint Registry Research Committee, and has had roles as a clinical analyser for the National Institute of Clinical Excellence.
His research has involved the biological study of why patients get arthritis, what happens to them when they get it, and how they can make better decisions about their treatment. As well as the genetic studies, such as when hip bones don’t properly develop, and understanding why that may be.
Yet, despite the recognition and award, Wilkinson was clear that there is still a long way to go in the field of arthritis, he said: “It’s an area which has been extremely underfunded, under researched, and with a huge unmet need, but one with a great opportunity to improve patients’ lives.
“It affects 40 percent of over 70-year-olds in the UK, over half of all men and women will consult their GP with [an] arthritis-related complaint. It affects 300 million people worldwide, and in the UK alone, your lifetime chance of getting a hip or knee replacement is about 1 in 7; it’s also the fourth largest NHS spend.”
“I would say that it is certainly overlooked.”
Most recently, Wilkinson has been integral to the development of Joint Calc, an online tool built using data collected by the National Joint Registry, a database which gives patients a personalised understanding of how different treatment choices might have an impact on their outcomes.
Wilkinson explained: “We first started that project five years go, and we’ve had postdocs working on it, and PhD students.
“That has evolved from its early durations as a tool to predict risk of reoperation and death, through to now having quite detailed assessments of personalised patient reported outcomes.
“We’ve got a new PhD student now who is working on neural network frameworks for predicting the outcomes, so we are now using AI approaches to personalise these outcome estimates.”
The system, which is hosted by the University of Sheffield, has now been accessed in over 110 countries around the world.
