On Wednesday, July 10, 2024, Professor Gabriel Sawakuchi – Medical Physicist, Professor at The University of Texas, and researcher at the MD Anderson Cancer Center of the same university – visited the Instituto do Câncer do Estado de São Paulo (ICESP) and gave a lecture to researchers from the Centro Translacional de Oncologia (CTO) and students from the Medical Physics course at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP).
The lecture, titled “Amplifying the effect of radiotherapy by targeting genetic vulnerabilities in cancer: from a brute-force one-fits-all approach to precision radiation oncology,” discussed advances in the use of radiotherapy for cancer patients. The Professor emphasized that his research is at the intersection of Physics and Biology, demonstrating the transdisciplinary nature of the studies conducted in his laboratory at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Professor Sawakuchi’s research aims to use radiotherapy in a personalized way, considering the characteristics of different types of cancer, as well as the healthy tissues surrounding the tumors that are also affected by radiation. In this regard, he seeks to develop strategies to predict the effectiveness of treatment according to the characteristics of each patient, offering more effective treatments in combating cancer cells and less harmful to healthy tissues.
Additionally, Professor Sawakuchi highlighted the differences obtained in treatments that use different types of radiation, notably irradiation with X-ray photons or with heavy particles (protons), as well as the association between radiation and the use of pharmaceuticals. His research demonstrates the importance of Medical Physics, a field that utilizes knowledge from Physics to generate advances in Medicine.
Professor Gabriel Sawakuchi graduated in Physics from USP, where he also completed his Master’s degree, before moving to the United States to pursue his Ph.D. research. He is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiation Physics, in the Division of Radiation Oncology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at The University of Texas, a center of excellence in Oncology, where he divides his time between clinical work and research. The Professor came to Brazil to participate in the XXII Congress of the Brazilian Society for Cell Biology, organized by the Sociedade Brasileira de Biologia Celular (SBBC).
The lecture was attended by Professor Elisabeth Mateus Yoshimura, Coordinator of the Medical Physics course at USP, and Professor Roger Chammas, Coordinator of the CTO at ICESP and C2PO at USP.