You specialise in nuclear medicine, what does that cover?
Nuclear medicine is the speciality that uses radioactivity in medicine for diagnosis and therapy and particularly for cancer. That can mean using radioactivity to do imaging scans of patients to help diagnose and assess disease, and it also covers using radioactivity to deliver treatments.
How did you train in this area?
I trained as a medical doctor in Bordeaux, France, then spent four years training in nuclear medicine before working at a major cancer centre in Nantes.
You are particularly interested in a targeted therapy called PRRT, can you tell us what that is?
PRRT stands for Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy. It is a very targeted treatment that can suit some patients. If a patient has cancer cells with a particular receptor on their surface, we can send the radiation directly to those cells. That means if the patient has cancer cells in many parts of the body, we can target the cancer cells with radiation while reducing the risk of damage to other parts of the body.
There have been warm tributes to the late journalist Tommie Gorman in the last couple of weeks, what was his connection with the treatment?
Many years ago, Tommie travelled to Sweden to receive PRRT for neuroendocrine cancer, and he did a huge amount of work with the patient community and to help bring the treatment to Ireland. He spoke at the launch of the service here, and I had the privilege of meeting him.
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What does having the PRRT treatment in Ireland mean?
Until we started the service last year, patients in Ireland who could benefit from the treatment needed to travel abroad. But now in Dublin, we can assess patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumours to make sure they are likely to benefit from the treatment, and if so then they can get the treatment here. It is usually an infusion of about 30-40 minutes per treatment.
What kind of research are you involved in?
At the moment we are working on research on using Artificial Intelligence to support imaging in nuclear medicine. When we capture radiological images from patients, we can see the pictures, but there is a lot more data behind those images too. So we are using specific tools and types of AI to work with us, to make sense of the data. This will help us improve our diagnoses, so we can deliver the right treatment to the right patient at the right moment.
What do you love about your work?
I think nuclear medicine is a promising tool in the management of cancer, and we are just at the start of PRRT and these new types of treatment for cancer. This is why I chose this speciality, it is full of innovation and lots of development, it is really interesting.
What do you like to do outside work?
I am married, have three small kids at home, and love sports and rugby. I grew up in a small village in France, near Toulouse, which is a big rugby area, and I have played touch rugby for a long time.
I play with a great club in Dublin, Old Wesley, and I am on the French national team to play in the World Cup this month in Nottingham in the UK, so I have been travelling over to France to train with the team there.
Between the clinic and research and family and rugby, how do you balance everything?
It’s challenging, but it is all about organisation.
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