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Physics PhD grad receives highly regarded award for best medical physics publication

TMU alumnus Tyler Hornsby awarded Sylvia Fedoruk Prize for first-of-its-kind study to overcome chemotherapy toxicity
July 02, 2024
Tyler Hornsby standing holding the Sylvia Fedoruk plaque

Tyler Hornsby, who earned his PhD and master's in physics from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), 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 TMU and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Science and Technology (iBEST), Anshuman Jakhmola, a postdoctoral fellow at TMU and iBEST, Michael Kolios, the associate dean, research, innovation and external partnerships at TMU’s Faculty of Science, and Jahan Tavakkoli, Hornby’s supervising physics professor.

"Tyler’s 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.

Read the researchers’ prize-winning paper "Kinetic modelling of ultrasound-triggered chemotherapeutic drug release from the surface of gold nanoparticles." (external link) 

Learn more about the Sylvia Fedoruk Prize. (external link) 

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