An accomplished lacrosse player, Charlotte de Vries is also a dedicated community volunteer who has given her time to nonprofits such as T&E Care and the Chester County Food Bank. Moreover, Charlotte de Vries has participated in multiple fundraising events in support of Operation Smile.
In addition to conducting hundreds of medical missions worldwide to provide life-changing surgery to individuals with cleft lip or cleft palate, Operation Smile operates research programs to better understand the cause of cleft and provide better care to its patients. One recent breakthrough that could effect newborns with cleft involves a discovery laid out in The Journal of Craniofacial Surgery in October 2018. Dr. Alejandro Garcia Botero of Hospital De San Jose in Colombia and his colleagues diagnosed cleft lip and palate on a fetus via ultrasound and, months after its birth, performed a procedure utilizing stem cells to correct it.
Following the delivery of the baby girl, a sample of her umbilical cord blood was obtained to isolate stem cells, which were subsequently processed and frozen for later use. After a few months of undergoing a nasoalveolar shaping procedure to align soft tissues in her upper jaw, the baby underwent “boneless” bone grafting surgery in which the collected stem cells were put in a small pocket of soft tissue to bridge the gap in her upper jaw. A follow-up confirmed the growth of new bone, and imaging scans performed when the girl was five years old showed significant improvement in bone thickness where the cleft had been.
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