Image-guided Surgery for Children’s Cancers

Research

Dr Giuliani’s vision is to help surgeons better visualise cancer at the time of the resection. His team is developing a novel imaging platform to enhance surgical precision in eradicating childhood cancers using fluorescence, photoacoustic imaging, and other innovative technologies. These techniques will help reduce damage to normal organs and obtain a complete removal of the tumour, leading to better surgical outcomes and survival.

Dr Giuliani’s group works at the interface of surgery, biomedical optics, and molecular imaging, collaborating with engineers, physicists, biologists, and clinicians across UCL, King’s College London, and the Institute of Cancer Research to rapidly translate laboratory discoveries into clinical trials.

Biography

Dr Giuliani is a Consultant Specialist Neonatal and Paediatric Surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), Honorary Associate Professor at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (GOS ICH), and since 2024 has served as Clinical Co-Director of the UCL Hawkes Institute for Interventional and Surgical Sciences, leading innovation in surgical imaging and digital surgery.

Briefly, he obtained his medical degree at the University of Udine (Italy) in 2000. He completed his specialist training in Paediatric Surgery at the University of Padova (Italy) in 2006. Then he worked for four years, clinically and as a PhD student, at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. He completed his PhD in Developmental Medicine and Health Planning Science at the University of Padova (Italy) in 2010. After that, he worked as a Consultant Paediatric Surgeon and honorary Senior Lecturer at St George’s University Hospitals (2011-2016). In 2015, he completed the Global Clinical Scholars Research Training Program (GCSRTP) at Harvard Medical School. This was a blended learning program in epidemiology and research with a focus on clinical trials.

Dr Giuliani moved to Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Institute of Child Health (ICH) at UCL in January 2017; since then, he has been focusing his clinical and academic career on paediatric surgical oncology. Dr Giuliani is a Principal Investigator at the UCL Hawkes Institute, where he regularly supervises clinical fellows and PhD students.

In 2019, he was awarded the Clinical Academic Research Partnership (CARP) from the Medical Research Council with the project titled ‘Colour-coded surgery in neuroblastoma: developing a dual PET and Near-Infrared Fluorescent Imaging (NIRF) probe to accurately visualise tumour from diagnosis to resection’.

In 2021, he was awarded the Wellcome Trust – Innovator Award together with a multidisciplinary team of basic scientists and biomedical engineers with a project titled ‘Novel image-guided therapeutics to improve surgical precision and loco-regional control in Neuroblastoma’.

Dr Giuliani has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and 12 book chapters, secured over £2 million in competitive research funding, and received multiple honours, including the David Hawkes Prize, the Peter Paul Rickham Prize, and the Alex Simpson Smith Travelling Fellowship.