For his innovative work using new types of agents for cancer therapy and imaging, University of Illinois Cancer Center member Tohru Yamada, PhD, was elected a 2023 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. The 2023 class of fellows includes 217 people from 118 research institutions worldwide who will be honored at a meeting in June.
Yamada, an associate professor in the departments of surgery and biomedical engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago, has been studying whether bacterial proteins and their fragments could be effective anticancer agents. One promising candidate, a peptide called p28, has been tested in two clinical trials in patients with advanced solid tumors and in pediatric patients with recurrent and refractory central-nervous-system tumors.
“None of this would have been possible without the collaborative efforts and the generous support of others. I would like to express my gratitude to the Department of Surgery – particularly, Warren H. Cole Chair in Surgery, Professor and Head Enrico Benedetti, MD; Director of Research in the Department of Surgery Ajay Rana, PhD; and Tapas K. Das Gupta MD, PhD, DSc, who was the inaugural Cancer Center Director, for the encouragement and support that have been the driving force behind these innovative projects,” said Yamada, part of the Cancer Center’s Translational Oncology Research Program.