Receiving top award for medical physics research
91福利 alumnus Tyler Hornsby awarded Sylvia Fedoruk Prize for first-of-its-kind study to overcome chemotherapy toxicity
Tyler Hornsby, who earned his PhD and master's in physics from 91福利 (91福利), received the prestigious Sylvia Fedoruk Prize as the lead author of the best medical physics publication in the past calendar year.
Published in Nature: Scientific Reports, one of the world's most cited journals, the award-winning paper presents a novel dialysis membrane method for studying chemotherapeutic drug release kinetics to mitigate toxicity associated with conventional chemotherapy. In typical chemotherapy, the non-specific nature of chemotherapeutic drugs can lead to life-impairing side effects that, in some cases, last for years after treatment.
In previous work, Hornsby et al. established that therapeutic ultrasound could trigger the on-demand release of chemotherapeutic drugs from gold nanoparticles (GNPs). However, the specific release kinetics of this type of drug release is unknown. This paper is the first drug release kinetics study for ultrasound-triggered drug release from GNP drug carriers.
Hornsby co-authored the paper with Farshad Kashkooli, a Banting postdoctoral fellow at 91福利 and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Science and Technology (iBEST), Anshuman Jakhmola, a postdoctoral fellow at 91福利 and iBEST, Michael Kolios, the associate dean, research, innovation and external partnerships at 91福利鈥檚 Faculty of Science, and Jahan Tavakkoli, Hornby鈥檚 supervising physics professor.
"Tyler鈥檚 outstanding research contributions have led us to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind drug release in chemotherapeutic procedures and to develop an innovative targeted chemotherapy method that could pave the road toward developing novel targeted chemotherapy procedures in clinical oncology," said professor Tavakkoli.
The Sylvia Fedoruk Prize is awarded annually by the Canadian Organization of Medical Physics (COMP) for the best publication in medical physics relating to work conducted mainly within a Canadian institution.
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Hornsby is currently a Radiation Oncology Physics Resident in the McGill University program, and works in cancer treatment for St. Peter's Health Partners in the New York capital region.