Meet The Surgeon Who Performed Britain's First Laparoscopic Prostatectomy

In 2000, when most urologists around the world were still removing prostates through open surgery, Professor Christopher Eden performed the UK's first laparoscopic radical prostatectomy.

Da Vinci robotic systems would not reach British hospitals in meaningful numbers for another six or seven years. This gap, more than any single statistic, is how Santis explains the results its founder produces today.

Professor Eden's prostate cancer practice has since completed more than 4,000 keyhole surgery operations, a caseload even high-volume UK hospital units would need a decade of institutional volume, not one career, to match. But that number turns out to be one of the least interesting things about him.

What separates his practice is not how many operations he has performed. It is how many of the past 26 years he spent doing the operation before the tools that now define it existed. Professor Eden learned the anatomy, perspective, and nuances first and only later used a robot to help.

A Fellowship Built Before the Robot Existed

Professor Eden's early training reads less like a standard surgical apprenticeship and more like a series of research placements. After earning his medical degree from the University of London in 1985 and winning both the surgery and paediatric prizes, he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1995.

He completed a Master of Surgery degree in 1997, the same year he travelled to the Institut Mutualiste Montsouris in Paris, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and the Cleveland Clinic in the United States—three institutions shaping the art of keyhole prostate surgery while it remained a minority technique practiced by only a handful of surgeons worldwide.

Professor Eden brought this approach back to Britain and built a series of national firsts.

Having already performed the UK's first laparoscopic pyeloplasty in 1994 whilst still a surgical trainee, he did the UK's first laparoscopic radical prostatectomy in 2000, and its first laparoscopic radical cystectomy in 2001, each a marker of a surgeon working at the cutting edge of what global urology considered possible at the time.

This work later received recognition from his peers and the wider health care industry. A Daily Mail poll of 40 UK consultant urologists described him as 'probably the leader in the field of keyhole radical prostatectomy,' and he appeared in the publication's guides to leading prostate cancer surgeons in 2010 and 2018.

He had already appeared on a similar list of surgeons in 2010, and the Independent Healthcare Award recognised his medical practice in 2007. His research was highly commended at the UK Quality in Care in Oncology awards in 2012, and he won awards in 2025 and 2026 for Patient Care and Innovation.

What the Long Run Bought Him

None of that career history would matter to a current patient if it had stayed in the past. Santis, Professor Eden's private prostate cancer clinic in London, argues that it did not.

Santis Health's model brings together three key technical modifications, each addressing a different aspect of the operation: the da Vinci Single Port robotic system to reduce the trauma of surgical access and support faster recovery, NeuroSAFE pathology to maximise safe nerve preservation while maintaining optimal cancer control, and the Retzius-sparing approach to improve early urinary continence.

All these innovations grew out of a surgeon who had already spent years watching how the standard operation cost patients when it did not need to, long before either technique had a reputation or a market.

He still operates with the same team that built that record. Consultant Anaesthetist Dr. Annie Haigh has supported the majority of his cases for more than 30 years, and a dedicated tableside robotic surgical assistant completes a unit that has worked together for more than a decade.

That continuity is not incidental to the results Santis reports; a technique this dependent on the details is only as reliable as a team that has learned to read each other in theatre, and Professor Eden's team has had 30 years to learn exactly that.

What Comes After the Record

Everything Professor Eden learned since becoming a Consultant 28 years ago shows up in something as ordinary as the way he runs a Friday clinic list, and that, more than any single statistic, is what defines Santis.

The clinic was never built to keep one exceptional surgeon busy. It exists to ensure that every man who walks through its doors, whatever his diagnosis, receives the same standard of care Professor Eden has spent 28 years refining, applied with the same rigour he had from the beginning.

Nearly 200 operations a year, carried out with a team that includes Dr. Haigh, is what consistency looks like when it is practised daily rather than claimed once. That consistency shapes how the clinic runs, not just what it offers.

According to Professor Eden, he applies Retzius-sparing surgery, NeuroSAFE, and the Single Port robot as the default standard of care in his own operating theatre, not as options reserved for a few favoured cases or complicated referrals.

He believes that if a technique meaningfully improves a man's odds of preserving continence and sexual function, every patient deserves to benefit from it, regardless of how his case looks on paper.

The same principle guides how he counsels patients long before either of them reaches the operating theatre. A man with a slower-growing, lower-risk tumour and a man with an aggressive prostate cancer receive different conversations and genuinely personalised guidance, not the same recommendation delivered twice.

According to Professor Eden, the true measure of Santis' success lies in making that standard of care repeatable, so that a man's odds of coming through surgery well no longer depend on the luck of his referral. Instead, they depend on whether the rest of the industry finally catches up with what one clinic in London and one surgeon's career have already shown is possible.