Dario Rodrigues
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Biomedical Engineering
High-grade brain cancers are hard to treat. Radiation doses cannot be raised much without harming healthy brain tissue, and many drugs never reach the tumor because the blood-brain barrier, a protective lining of brain blood vessels, keeps them out.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Engineering
- Topics
hyperthermia
brain tumors
glioblastoma
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2031
What they work on
- Develop Halo, an external phased array of 72 microwave antennas at 915 MHz that focuses heating to 40-44°C deep within the brain and remains compatible with MRI.
- Build patient-specific 3D hyperthermia treatment-planning software and pair it with MR thermometry, MRI-based real-time temperature mapping, to plan, monitor and guide heating.
- Run an in silico clinical trial across a virtual head model database covering varied tumor sizes and locations, and use it to train AI tools for fast tissue segmentation and temperature-pattern prediction.
- Validate heating performance in anatomically realistic phantoms and tumor-bearing minipigs, comparing predicted with measured temperatures and assessing tissue safety by histopathology.
More about the research
Hyperthermia, heating a tumor to 40-44°C for about an hour, can make radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy work better: it blocks tumor DNA repair, increases blood flow and vessel permeability, and opens the blood-brain barrier so drugs get in. In randomized trials, heating delivered through probes placed inside brain tumors more than doubled two-year survival in glioblastoma patients. But those methods are invasive and workflow-heavy, so few patients receive them.
Why it matters
Patients with high-grade brain cancers such as glioblastoma could benefit if tumors can be heated precisely without surgery. A non-invasive, MRI-guided hyperthermia platform could strengthen radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy, may allow lower radiation doses with less normal-brain toxicity, and could improve drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hyunsuk Shim
Emory University, GA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop rapid, motion-robust spectroscopic MRI scans of the whole brain that improve image quality for detecting infiltrating brain tumor.
Eli Vlaisavljevich
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Biomedical Engineering
Design a flat, high-frequency histotripsy array transducer with built-in high-resolution ultrasound imaging, and tune its pulse settings to destroy thyroid tissue while sparing nearby nerves and vessels.
Akila Viswanathan
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop multi-parametric MRI maps of perfusion, diffusion, fibrosis and oxygenation that help expert clinicians distinguish residual cervical tumor from normal tissue after external beam radiation.
The school
University of Maryland, Baltimore: 23 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 79 research doctorates a year.
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