Dr Lucas Souza is a distinguished researcher currently serving as the Research Laboratory Manager at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital. Dr Souza’s career reflects a strong commitment to both research and education. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Marie Skłodowska Curie research fellow at Aston University. Subsequently, he joined Aston Medical School as a Clinical Teaching Fellow and the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital as a Research Associate, before taking on his current role as Research Laboratory Manager in 2023. As Principal Investigator and Lead Applicant, he secured significant funding from the Royal Orthopaedic Charity for research projects focused on regenerative medicine and cancer therapies. His co-investigator roles in grants from the Bone Cancer Research Trust, Sarcoma UK, NIHR, and Dubrowsky Charitable Funds led him to be listed among the four most promising young researchers in the field of bone cancer in the UK in the current year by the Bone Cancer Research Trust.
OPN: What drove you to choose a career in medical research and education?
LS: Since quite early in my life, education and research have been intertwined. I started doing research when I was only 19 years old during the second year of my undergraduate studies in Physical Therapy and since then I never stopped. I developed a passion for discovering new things and for teaching them to others. Thus, my transitions into a Master’s, PhD, and Teaching/Research positions were always very smooth. It felt like I was just doing what I like and that needed to be done, which was seeking to develop better treatments for bone disorders such as critical-sized bone defects and bone cancer, and in the process, I ended up accumulating lots of degrees and a somewhat decent resumé. I now see my career as my biggest chance to contribute to humanity, by developing something that could save lives or improve someone’s quality of life even long after my death. It’s this feeling of being part of something much bigger than me that keeps me always motivated to work.
OPN: You are currently undertaking research looking into bone tumours. Could you tell us more about it?
LS: The ultimate goal of our research is to develop a biomaterial that can prevent the main complications of the surgical treatment in patients with bone cancer, which are: (a) cancer recurrence; (b) implant failure, and (c) infection. The active component of our biomaterial is a bioactive glass containing gallium, an anti-cancer chemical element. Bioactive glasses are bio ceramics that have been largely used for bone regeneration in several orthopaedic and dental applications; by doping them with gallium we seek to expand its application for bone cancers. We intend to produce a minimally invasive injectable gel loaded with powdered particles of this cancer-killing bioactive glass to be used to fill in bone voids. The material stimulates fast bone formation to promote enhanced bone regeneration and serves as a drug delivery system for anti-cancer and antimicrobial ions.
OPN: What could your findings mean to help support the treatment of bone tumours and what will be the effect on patient experience?
LS: So far, we have demonstrated that primary bone cancer cells are about 4 times more sensitive to the metallic ion gallium than normal cells. This means that we have quite a large therapeutic window to explore. We then doped bioactive glasses with gallium to use the glass particles as a drug delivery system for localized delivery of gallium ions to kill cancer cells. This bi-functional material could then repair bone defects and kill bone cancer cells at the same time. We anticipate that such an approach could significantly improve treatment outcomes, reducing hospitalization times, cancer recurrence, infection rates, and the number of revision surgeries, increasing life expectancy and the quality of life of patients.
OPN: What is planned for the next stage of your research?
LS: Our research project is now split into two fronts: (1) combining our gallium-doped bioactive glass powder with biodegradable polymers to produce a minimally invasive injectable hydrogel, and (2) testing the anti-cancer potential of gallium and gallium-doped glasses upon bone metastatic cells. We are trying to raise funds to perform an animal study where we intend to use a bone tumour animal model to test the efficacy and safety of minimally invasive injectable hydrogels containing the gallium-doped bioactive glasses. Alongside this, we have extracted cancer cells from biopsies of bone metastases removed from patients in the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital (ROH) and have been investigating if they too are sensitive to gallium and gallium-doped glasses. Such finding would drastically expand the use of our biomaterial since there are significantly more patients with bone metastases than with primary bone tumours.
OPN: How does the future look in t