Carlos Huesa receives the American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Carlos Huesa-Berral has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Cancer Society. for his project entitled “Computational Modeling and Simulation of Hepatic Tumors for Enhanced Transarterial Radioembolization”. Carlos will start this 3-year-long project on January 1st, 2025. This fellowship is highly competitive, with only a small percentage of applicants nationwide receiving the honor and the potential to get future ACS funding that only previous grant recipients can apply for.


Here is a summary of the project:

Liver cancer is one of the most prominent worldwide, still representing the third cause of oncologic deaths. The only curative option is surgery, which is unavailable for many patients due to medical complications and tumor inaccessibility. There are alternative treatments for these patients, one of the most promising being TARE (Transarterial Radioembolization). In a TARE procedure, a microcatheter injects small radioactive beads into the hepatic artery to reach the tumor. These beads emit radiation that kills the cancer cells. Beads are directed to the tumor through the hepatic artery, as tumors receive blood from arteries while the healthy liver does from veins. Increasing the radioactivity delivered to the tumor leads to a higher dose and, therefore, greater effectiveness. Consequently, the goal is to concentrate as many of these beads as possible in the tumor, sparing the healthy tissue. TARE is showing promising results in clinical trials associated with personalized dosimetry. However, the current clinical methods used in TARE for planning are somewhat rudimentary. First, the current pre-planning methods use test beads tailored for imaging purposes as a surrogate of the treatment beads. As they differ in physical properties, they do not behave the same as the treatment ones. Second, the methods used to calculate the dose delivered to the tumor and healthy tissue contain important uncertainties and cannot be used to predict the optimal treatment for each patient. This project addresses these limitations by creating a predictive TARE dosimetry methodology, facilitating treatment optimization for different treatment scenarios. This will help clinicians plan the treatment more accurately, ensuring that the right amount of radiation is delivered to the tumor. This project will make TARE more effective and personalized, opening the door to curing more patients with liver cancer for whom current therapeutic options are limited.

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