PhD Advanced thermo-chemotherapeutic treatment for breast cancer treatment

Breast cancer is the most common cancer for women worldwide. Not all patients respond to chemotherapy for the necessary downstaging to permit breast conserving surgery. The objective of the four year multicenter research project “Development of personalized MR-guided thermo-chemotherapy for breast conserving surgery” is to solve this problem by developing treatment technology for applying and monitoring effective novel personalized breast cancer treatments combining MR-guided local thermotherapy with ‘smart’ nano-chemotherapy.

This project is supported by a grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO and performed at four Dutch centers. The work package at Amsterdam UMC aims to assist treatment delivery by creating a novel form of advanced treatment planning to predict the local drug distribution, and the temperature dependent effectiveness and cytotoxicity of these drugs. This is done in a digital model simulating the flow, heat and drug transport in a breast treated with thermo-chemotherapy. During treatments invasive and non-invasive thermometry will be combined with temperature simulations to reconstruct the true temperature distributions, which are combined with knowledge on temperature-dependent drug effectiveness to compute the combined effect of heat and chemotherapy. Goal is to establish strategies resulting in effective tumor eradication without unacceptable local and systemic side effects.

We are looking for a PhD student for four years with a physics background for designing and applying this digital model. Examples of a comparable form of modelling we developed for chemotherapy delivery during Hyperthermic IntraPeritoneal Chemotherapy are given in https://doi.org/10.1080/10717544.2020.1862364 and https://doi.org/10.1080/02656736.2020.1852324

A team of physicists, biologists and clinicians will advise on the work performed by the student.

The PhD student has a physics background and will create the novel form of advanced treatment planning to predict the local drug and temperature distribution, and ultimately the temperature dependent effectiveness and cytotoxicity of these drugs. This is involves developing a digital breast tumor model for simulating the flow, heat and drug transport in the breast during thermo-chemotherapy.

Work will involve development, adaptation and application of advanced computer models simulating various aspects of the thermo-chemotherapy breast cancer treatment, which is novel in the field.

The candidate will work at the Department of Radiation Oncology of the Amsterdam University Medical centers, location AMC. The candidate will collaborate with biologists, physicists and clinicians at both locations of Amsterdam UMC, as well as with PhD students working on CARES at TU Eindhoven, UMC Utrecht and Erasmus MC Rotterdam.

The Amsterdam UMC and the PI’s for this project are widely acknowledged as leading experts in the field of clinical, pre-clinical and technical research on hyperthermia combined with radiotherapy or chemotherapy. Hyperthermia research is thriving at Amsterdam UMC and preclinical research results are readily translated into clinical practice.