Marseille Surgeon Brings Complex Pelvis Tumour Skills to La Réunion

Marseille’s surgical know-how has just been tested at the far end of the French hospital map, and by all accounts it held up. Dr Jean-Camille Mattei, an orthopaedic oncology surgeon with the Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Marseille, has returned from La Réunion, where he assisted a colleague in performing a tumour surgery of the pelvis, one of the most complex procedures in his discipline. The operation stands as a concrete example of cooperation between doctors, regions and public health establishments, carried out across roughly 9,000 kilometres.

The delivery of such an intervention depends on a small chain of specialised hands. On the ground alongside Dr Mattei were Dr Romain Léonard, Stéphanie Dabourdy, a theatre nurse, and Nolwenn Gelin of the company Adler, which manufactures the custom-made implant used in the procedure. Dr Antoine Adam and Romane Balteaux, an intern, completed the team.

What made the mission possible was a distinctive expertise. Dr Mattei specialises in sarcomas, rare cancers that affect around 5,000 people each year in France, accounting for 1 per cent of adult cancers and 10 per cent of childhood cases. These tumours can arise in “soft” tissues such as muscles and blood vessels, or in “hard” structures like bone and cartilage.

For the Marseille surgeon, the clinical reality is often underestimated. “Most of the time, sarcomas settle in the muscles of the arms and legs, particularly the thigh. It is little known to the public but it is not so rare: there are more sarcomas than cervical cancers, whose annual incidence is 3,000 cases,” he explained. He was careful to put that figure in perspective, noting that lung cancer affects 50,000 people a year, with breast and prostate cancers reaching 60,000.

Behind this kind of surgery sits the wider system that routes patients to the right team. The Netsarc+ network, accredited by the Institut National du Cancer, brings together 22 reference centres. It is this structure that organises how patients reach the right team for a given intervention, and it is within that framework that a Marseille surgeon can be mobilised to support a colleague on an island hospital thousands of kilometres away.

The Réunion operation shows what such cooperation delivers in practice: a highly complex pelvic tumour procedure performed locally, with no need for the patient to travel to mainland France. The visiting specialist, the local surgical team and the implant manufacturer worked as one unit. For public hospital networks, the case demonstrates how expertise can be transmitted and deployed where it is needed, closing the distance between a reference centre and a remote operating theatre.

The article, published by La Provence and reported by Audrey Avesque, is reserved for subscribers, with the remainder of the text behind a paywall. What is already visible is enough to show the shape of the model: a recognised expertise travelling to the point of need, backed by a national network and a custom implant supplier, and a complex operation successfully carried out where the patient lives. Whether that model can be replicated at scale, the visible text does not say.