Key Points
- Dr. Meng is a neurosurgeon and scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center and Sunnybrook Research Institute.
- Learn more about her work developing focused ultrasound for the treatment of brain tumors and neurodegenerative conditions.
Dr. Ying Meng is a neurosurgeon and scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center and Sunnybrook Research Institute and a faculty member at the University of Toronto. Her research centers on developing therapeutic focused ultrasound as innovative, noninvasive treatments for brain tumors and neurodegenerative conditions. Dr. Meng has authored more than 70 peer-reviewed publications, many of them breaking new ground in areas related to focused ultrasound treatment for brain tumors and Alzheimer’s disease, in addition to other topics.
We recently spoke with her about her work and thoughts on the future of the technology.
How did you become interested in focused ultrasound?
I learned of focused ultrasound during my neurosurgery residency, when I worked with Nir Lipsman, MD, PhD. As a second-year resident, I was fascinated by the research he was pursuing, and our conversations about his work sparked my curiosity about the field. When it came time to begin my PhD project, he had just started his position at Sunnybrook Hospital, and I was excited to join his team and become involved in focused ultrasound research.
What are your areas of interest in focused ultrasound?
My primary area of interest is using focused ultrasound to temporarily and precisely disrupt the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Early in my career, I was involved in one of the first BBB opening procedures in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, an experience that demonstrated the potential of focused ultrasound to move innovative research from the lab to the bedside. Given my background in engineering, I feel it is really important to bridge the basic science with patient care, and that experience ultimately ignited my passion for advancing focused ultrasound research. Being part of that multidisciplinary effort—and seeing preclinical findings become clinical trials—solidified my passion for advancing focused ultrasound as a therapeutic technology.
Tell us about that experience.
There was an excitement in having engineers, physicists, neurosurgeons, neurologists, and the patient all come together to demonstrate, for the first time, that focused ultrasound could safely and temporarily open the BBB in a human. Seeing years of preclinical research at Sunnybrook translate into a successful clinical trial was an incredibly powerful experience and showed me what is possible through collaboration.
Tell us about your current pediatric clinical trial.
I’m proud to be helping lead a pediatric clinical trial at Sunnybrook that is evaluating the safety and feasibility of combining focused ultrasound BBB disruption with doxorubicin in children with glioma. This is a collaboration with Children’s National Hospital and SickKids Hospital, and our goal is to improve drug delivery for a devastating disease, where current treatment options are limited and outcomes remain poor. Because these tumors in the pons typically don’t take up contrast agents well, many therapies struggle to reach them effectively. Our hope is that temporarily opening the BBB with focused ultrasound will allow more chemotherapy to reach the tumor and ultimately improve treatment.
As a Phase I study, our primary focus is on safety and feasibility, so we closely monitor patients throughout the procedure and during recovery, especially given the sensitive location of these tumors. Recruiting families for this study has been challenging, as the patients are very young and require general anesthesia, making participation a significant commitment. I’m incredibly grateful to the children and their families for taking part, as well as to our multidisciplinary team and collaborators who have made this work possible.
You were also part of a clinical trial using BBB opening in patients with breast cancer metastasis?
That’s one of the studies I’m most excited about because it was a major focus of my PhD research. What made this trial unique was our ability to radiolabel trastuzumab, which allowed us to directly see where the drug was going in the brain after BBB opening with focused ultrasound. Before this, it was difficult to know how much of a large molecule therapy was actually reaching the target tissue. We often rely on MRI contrast agents like gadolinium as an indirect measure of BBB permeability, but those molecules are much smaller than many of the drugs we’re trying to deliver. By radiolabeling trastuzumab, we were able to demonstrate that focused ultrasound increased delivery of the drug to the targeted brain tissue, providing important evidence that the technology is achieving exactly what it’s designed to do in patients.
Tell us about your liquid biopsy work and how that may impact the field.
Our work on liquid biopsy actually began somewhat unexpectedly. We were conducting a clinical trial to evaluate the safety and feasibility of BBB opening in patients with glioblastoma receiving temozolomide, and one of the most consistent findings we observed was an increase in circulating tumor biomarkers after each treatment. That observation was inspired by preclinical work from Hong Chen, PhD, showing that BBB opening could allow brain tumor biomarkers to enter the bloodstream, and we were excited to see a similar effect in patients through increased circulating cell-free DNA.
Since then, other studies, including a recent multicenter trial, have supported these findings and suggested that these biomarkers may even help identify which patients are responding to treatment earlier. That has led to additional clinical research focused specifically on liquid biopsy, and I’m looking forward to seeing those results because they could open the door to less invasive ways of monitoring brain tumors and guiding treatment.
What do you see as impediments to your success?
One of the biggest hurdles is funding. As with many novel technologies in Canada, the challenge isn’t just demonstrating that focused ultrasound works—it’s ensuring there are enough resources to make it broadly available to the patients who could benefit. We already see this with focused ultrasound thalamotomy, which is clinically approved but still has long wait lists because access is limited. As the field continues to grow, expanding funding and infrastructure will be essential to bringing these treatments to more patients in a timely way.
Sunnybrook is a Focused Ultrasound Center of Excellence. Who are your research collaborators there?
One of the things I value most about working at Sunnybrook is its collaborative environment. We have an exceptional technical team, including Kullervo Hynynen, PhD, and Meaghan O’Reilly, PhD. We work together almost every day. Many of our most productive conversations happen informally in the hallway, where engineers, physicists, and clinicians are constantly exchanging ideas. That close collaboration extends from preclinical research through clinical trials, and it’s been essential to the progress we’ve made over the past decade. We also work very closely with our neuro-oncology colleagues, and having everyone united by a shared vision for advancing focused ultrasound has been one of the greatest strengths of our program.
Do you have advice to share with other focused ultrasound teams?
It is very important to build a strong technical team. It’s essential to work with engineers and physicists who not only understand the intricacies of the technology and how ultrasound behaves in practice, but who also keep patient safety at the center of everything they do. Our team has found that having an open line of communication allows us to work through unexpected findings together, whether we’re interpreting an MRI, troubleshooting a challenge, or looking for ways to optimize a treatment. I think it’s absolutely essential for any institution starting a focused ultrasound program.
Where do you see focused ultrasound in 10 years?
In the next decade, I see focused ultrasound becoming something that can be done much more routinely in the clinic. I envision a future where BBB opening could be done in standard infusion centers alongside chemotherapy or other cancer treatments, almost at the bedside. That shift would make the procedure much more tolerable for patients and, importantly, much easier for clinicians to adopt as part of routine care.
What are the barriers to making focused ultrasound more accessible?
Right now, procedures like BBB opening still require an MRI suite, head frames, and a fairly involved setup. However, the technology is already moving in a direction where that may no longer be necessary. It will need to be cost-effective enough to be accessible within a publicly funded system, and that means the technology will need to become less expensive and less resource intensive. These are important considerations for us, particularly as engineers, to ensure that what we are developing is not only effective, but also practical and broadly accessible.
What is most exciting about focused ultrasound?
It offers a way to noninvasively change the physiology of the brain in ways we haven’t been able to do before. It’s attractive because it can produce a range of meaningful biological effects, whether that’s neuromodulation or BBB opening. That versatility opens the door to thinking about a wide variety of disease applications. At the same time, it has the potential to be a relatively portable and cost-effective technology, which raises the possibility that it could one day be made accessible to many more patients.
How has the Foundation played a role in your work?
The Foundation has been so supportive of the research at Sunnybrook and easy to work with. Everyone I’ve met at the Foundation has been passionate about their work and seeing this technology grow. Thank you for supporting us and all the work that’s been done by other centers around the world.
This profile was adapted from Dr. Meng’s Curing with Sound podcast from April 2026.