|
Professor
Ahmad Awada was born in Lebanon
and studied medicine at the Free University in Brussels (ULB), Belgium.
He specialised in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology at Jules Bordet Institute
(under the supervision of Professor Jean Klastersky), in Brussels, until 1992 ("La plus grande
distinction"). During his specialisation, he completed his training in the
clinical development of new therapies and new anticancer drugs (under the
supervision of Professor Martine Piccart).
In order to deepen his training,
he stayed both in the Netherlands
(New Drug Development Office, Free University, Amsterdam)
and in San Antonio, USA (Institute for Drug
Development, under the direction of Professor D. Von Hoff). He focused on the
clinical development for new anticancer agents.
Back from the USA at the beginning of 1994, Dr. Awada became
Assistant Head of the Medical Oncology Clinic, and Head of the New Drugs
Development Unit at Jules Bordet Institute, Brussels. He is currently Head of
the Medical Oncology Clinic since April 2005 and has an important clinical
activity in the treatment of solid tumors. Dr. Awada also played an active part
in the development of new drugs, some of them already widely used.
Thanks to the recent progress
in technology and computer sciences, and consequently in molecular biology, we
can better understand how a cancer cell works and how it becomes a cancer cell.
Many drugs are now studied to block this process. These are molecular-targeted therapies;
a subject studied extensively in clinical research by Dr. Awada and was the
basis for his thesis obtained from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, in 2004.
The aim of Dr. Awada, as far
as research is concerned, is to look for new active anticancer drugs in solid
tumors (new cytotoxics and molecular targeted therapies), and to individualize
the treatments according to the tumor characteristics.
Dr. Awada is member of several
societies and responsible teacher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He
received 2 awards, one of them from the Medicine Royal
Academy. He has also published
23 book chapters, 120 articles in international publications and 26 articles in
Belgian publications.
| 
