Professor Christophe Lees
speaker
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first heard Aug 2026
last heard 1 Aug
Professor Christophe Lees’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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About a third of all twins are identical, and about 10% of those will develop this condition, which arises because they share a placenta.
If the blood vessels direct blood from one twin to another, then one twin can gradually lose its circulating blood volume, and the other twin ends up suffused with blood, with too much blood and fluid, and then that can cause real difficulties for one or both of the twins.
and it can lead to miscarriage or entry-time death, very unfortunately.
So very, very high power, and I'm talking about thousands of times the power of standard ultrasound, directed very, very specifically to a tiny point, and we've used it from outside the mother's abdomen, so we don't need to do anything invasive at all, and that allows you to focus extremely carefully and precisely...
on one little area, one or two millimeters in diameter, so a blood vessel.
And we can actually stop the blood flow by using high-intensity focused ultrasound.
We could image, we could do scans at the same time, so we could see exactly where we were placing the high-intensity focused ultrasound beam.
And really, the challenge is to be able to do this safely and do it effectively.
So could we see the vessels in the placenta?
Well, 10, 15 years ago, you couldn't.
But advances in ultrasound imaging have allowed us to visualize tiny vessels with very low velocity flow in the placenta.
And of course, the next stage is being able to do this safely.
We have to be extremely careful.
And fortunately, none of the women in our series survived.
got skin burns and that's the key thing.
There is minimal or no heating.
So we described in the paper that's just been published, we described our first experience of 10 women.
So we're not at a stage yet where we have said this is a clinically available treatment that cures twin twin.
We're at a stage where we can say we can in principle do this treatment.
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