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Mario Ries, Ph.D., a physicist at the Laboratory for Functional and Molecular Imaging in Bordeaux, France, has been intrigued with the notion of combining noninvasive ablation with MR guidance since 1997. Today, his key ambition is help the roughly one to one and a half million people globally diagnosed with breast cancer every year. Ries has received a $100,000 research award from the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation to pursue a project he believes will result in a safer and more effective treatment for breast cancer. His objective is to solve the technical drawbacks that cause existing high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) transducers – devices that convert energy into sound waves and focus the waves on a target – to damage tissue around the breast, including to the thoracic cage, heart and lungs. Click here to read full report.

I recently attended the Society for Thermal Medicine‘s Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA. Throughout the meeting it became abundantly clear that there is a rationale for clinical applications of mild hyperthermia — especially with the significant number of phase III clinical trial data shown in an overview presentation given by Elizabeth Repasky, Ph.D. from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, as well as presentation of work by the leading clinical group from Munich of Prof. Dr. Rolf Issels, M.D. and Dr. Lars Lindner.  A randomized phase III clinical trial performed by Issels and Lindner was recently published in Lancet Oncology and showed a significant survival benefit when mild hyperthermia (heating to ~42 °C) is delivered in combination with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Russian-born Natasha Rapoport, Ph.D., a research professor of bioengineering at the University of Utah, knows something of pain and trauma. Her physician father, Yakov, was jailed in 1953, wrongly accused in an infamous, yet fictitious “Doctor’s Plot” to assassinate Stalin. Natasha was 14 when she opened the door and her beloved papa was whisked away to be manacled and interrogated. Yakov Rapoport survived, and both father and daughter later wrote memoirs. Yakov has died, and Natasha has traded the Moscow forests for Salt Lake’s desert. But she carries on the family scientific tradition in a quest to make currently fatal pancreatic cancer a chronic, or even curable, disease.

The call for abstracts opened on May 30 and will close on July 29 for the 1st European Symposium on MR-guided Focused Ultrasound Therapy. Organized by the Department of Radiology of the University of Rome La Sapienza, the symposium will be held September 22 and 23, 2011 in Rome. Directed to physicians of various sub-specialties, physicists and basic scientists throughout the European Community, the symposium seeks to bridge the gap between basic research and clinical activity. Topics being covered by its faculty of global thought leaders and researchers include: technology, brain, breast, bone tumors, liver, pancreas, prostate, uterine fibroids, targeted drug delivery. The symposium will conclude with an oncology round. Serving as Symposium Presidents are Roberto Passariello M.D., Professor of Radiology and Chairman, Department of Radiology at Sapienza University of Rome and Neal F. Kassell, M.D., Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia and Founder of Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation, which is a conference sponsor. In addition to Passarriello, the symposium organizing committee consists of two other members of Sapienza’s Radiology Department: Carlo Catalano, M.D., Vice Chair and Head of CT and MR Sections and Alessandro Napoli, M.D., Ph.D., Head of MR-guided FUS Unit. Complete information about the symposium >