Dr. Steven Curley

Name: Dr. Steven Curley

Educational Qualification: Phd.

Designation: Professor and Chief of Surgical Oncology, USA.

Department: Oncology

Email: steven.curley@bcm.edu

Research Interests: Thermal cytotoxicity in cancer cells

Biography: I am Professor and Chief of Surgical Oncology at the Baylor College of Medicine and a Professor in Nano- Materials Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. I was at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson on the faculty for 22 years, and joined the faculty at the Baylor College of Medicine in January, 2014. My clinical duties involve providing surgical care for patients with hepatobiliary and gastrointestinal malignancies. I operate on patients two days a week and have a full clinic every week to evaluate new, consult, and follow-up patients. The remainder of my time is spent on clinical and laboratory research. My research laboratory has been involved in design, bench testing, preclinical testing, and then clinical testing of two devices and one new drug which have all successfully gone through the full FDA approval process. Thus, this is truly a translational research laboratory. The laboratory is currently focused on testing of a novel noninvasive radiofrequency (RF) field treatment device. This is coupled with targeted delivery of metallic or semiconducting nanoparticles to cancer cells which release heat under RF field induction, thus causing thermal cytotoxicity in cancer cells. We are performing complex physicochemical measurements of the nanoparticles, and conjugating the nanoparticles to antibodies, peptides, and pharmacologic agents to target them to cancer cells. The laboratory combines physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and bioengineering to produce a state-of-the-art approach to novel cancer treatment. Furthermore, we have discovered that many of the nanoparticles are multifunctional and may be used as optical or radiologic diagnostic materials, in addition to being used as a therapeutic agent in the noninvasive RF field. We are currently performing in vivo preclinical studies with this RF/nanoparticle system to obtain data adequate to allow us to petition the FDA for human clinical trials.