The Academy of Athens has awarded Stavroula Sofou, professor in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, the 2023 Dionisopoulou Prize by the Achilles and Ekaterina Dionisopoulou for her work on targeting several regions of solid tumors using the same cancer therapeutic simultaneously using multiple delivery methods. The Academy of Athens, Greece’s highest research establishment, awards the Dionisopoulou Prize to original research that aids in the treatment of cancer.
Sofou and her team released their research in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, where they found that using multiple delivery methods with the same therapeutic can overcome a major issue when it comes to preventing tumor growth. Tumors are complex with various compositions and microenvironments. These variations in tumor structure impacts how drugs are delivered and distributed within the tumor, causing treatments to fail as the cancer cells in different locations cannot be reached to be destroyed by the therapeutic.
Using this innovative method, Sufou’s research observed that tumors were prevented from further growth and metastasis development.
Along with her role as a professor with ChemBE, Sofou is a member in the Cancer Invasion & Metastasis Program at JHU Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, has a secondary appointment in the Department of Oncology, and is associate researcher at the Institute of NanoBioTechnology (INBT). Sofou is most known for her non-traditional approaches to combat difficult-to-kill cancers in diffusion-limited environments.