Dr. Brad Wouters appointed Senior Investigator in Selective Therapies Program

Dr. Brad Wouters

After spending seven years leading a radiation oncology laboratory in Europe, cancer cell biologist Dr. Brad Wouters is returning to Ontario’s cancer research community.

Wouters was appointed Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI) and Director of OCI’s Hypoxia and Microenvironment Program and Professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. He has also received an investigator award from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and will contribute to its Selective Therapies Program as a senior investigator.

Wouters’ work deals with tumour cells’ unique ability to survive and thrive in stressful micro-environments that are not found in other normal tissues. Characterized by extreme differences in nutrient supply, pH and oxygenation, these environments promote tumour malignancy and prevent effective treatment for patients.

Wouters’ lab has identified new signalling pathways that influence how tumours respond to environments with reduced oxygenation. Using high-throughput approaches the lab is defining the molecular basis of these signalling pathways and establishing their importance for future cancer therapies.

For the past seven years, Wouters was Head Scientist at the Maastricht Radiation Oncology Laboratory (Maastro Lab) azM/University of Maastricht/GROW Research Institute. He also served as an Associate Professor and later as a Full Professor at the University of Maastricht.

Wouters completed a PhD in physics at the University of British Columbia and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Radiation Oncology. Before moving to the Netherlands he served as an associate research scientist with the Ottawa General Hospital Research Institute, an assistant professor in the Department of Radiology in University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine and a career scientist in the Centre for Cancer Therapeutics at the Ottawa Regional Cancer Centre.