Ortho-Oncology at Mass General:
A Spirit of Collaboration
In This Video
- Santiago Lozano-Calderon, MD, PhD, is engaged in multidisciplinary research projects that allow him to collaborate across Massachusetts General Hospital, working with colleagues from Orthopaedic Surgery, the Cancer Center and Plastic Surgery
- Dr. Lozano-Calderon's ambitious research agenda, including work with microRNAs, artificial intelligence (AI) and radiolucent implants, benefits from the resources, teams and perspectives only available at Mass General
In this video, Santiago Lozano-Calderon, MD, PhD, surgeon in the Orthopaedic Oncology Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses the research environment at Mass General. Dr. Lozano-Calderon's unique, diverse and ambitious research agenda benefits from the interdisciplinary approach Mass General takes to clinical and research oncology.
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Transcript
One of the most special things about doing research at Mass General is the spirit of collaboration and friendship. The people that I work with, I don't see simply as colleagues, I see them as friends that are in the battle of building science and providing clinical care and we don't get to see each other only in the office or in the lab, we get to share some time socially and with our families. So when you have, like, really a partnership and it's not about a competition, it's about building things that are meaningful together and protocols together and new technologies together for patient care. A collaboration that is very fruitful, for example, is we have a special center for management and research in amputation care and I have a multidisciplinary research team with colleagues in plastic surgery, orthopaedic trauma surgery, physical therapy, psychiatry and physical rehabilitation.
Each of the projects that I'm involved in, artificial intelligence or developing of calculators, different themes common to participation, their work in the cancer center is very interesting and fulfilling because it is based on multidisciplinary collaboration, and there is a lot of work that goes behind the scenes through emails, phone calls, in which you have partners that help you to provide care to the patients—and they are literally a text message away or a phone call away.
From the physician's perspective, it is a very educational experience because when you are evaluating patients, you don't see a patient just through the eyes of your specialty, but you learn to see what the other specialties are seeing on the patient, and that knowledge from the perspective of all other specialties opens your horizon to understand the patient better and provide better treatment plans, but also opens your horizon in research and then that spirit of multidisciplinary care automatically translates into multidisciplinary research, in which you start to identify questions that are not just relevant for your specific oncologist for specialty but to other subspecialties in the Cancer Center. And that just fosters collaboration, communication and team effort, which are the key elements for a successful cancer center for the treatment of patients.
This spirit of collaboration in our department is what fosters this and interactions for research and make it so diverse that we can go from the molecular level with the micro RNA to the computational level with artificial intelligence models to specific device research that we do, for example, with radiolucent implants to make easier the identification of tumors when using MRIs and CT scans. So that is why this spectrum of research is only possible when you have multiple collaborators and an institution like this and colleagues like the ones that work here at Mass General that are willing to build in this multidisciplinary experience.
Learn more about Orthopaedic Oncology Service at Mass General
Learn more about the Musculoskeletal Oncology Fellowship at Mass General