Victor Santoro Fernandes, PhD
University of Wisconsin-Madison

BTSI

The North American Neuroendocrine Tumor Society (NANETS) congratulates Victor Santoro Fernandes, PhD, Fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison, as the 2024 recipient of NANETS’ Basic/Translational Science Investigator Award (BTSI). Dr. Fernandes was awarded this scholarship for his proposal: Modeling to Predict Benefit of PRRT in NET Patients.

Dr Fernandes is the inaugural recipient of the UW-Madison Department of Medical Physics’ postdoctoral entrepreneurial fellowship (PEF). This fellowship recognizes his potential for leading a technology development and translation endeavor and fosters the development Dr. Fernandes’ leadership and entrepreneurial skills. His PhD work, under the supervision of Dr. Robert Jeraj, focused on development, implementation, clinical validation, and translation of software to automate quantitative longitudinal image biomarker extraction and disease response assessment of solid cancers (e.g., melanoma and neuroendocrine tumors). Dr. Fernandes will be mentored by both Dr. Jeraj and Dr. Renuka Iyer, Professor of Oncology, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“Dr. Santoro-Fernandes is an outstanding scientist whose skills and commitment will help advance our understanding of NET therapy benefits and risks to the patients,” said Dr. Iyer. “I believe he will quickly rise to be a leader in defining and advancing high-quality investigations in the field of PRRT benefit prediction, bring a valuable new area of expertise we don’t have enough of in the NET community, and give back to his mentees and trainees.”

The successful completion of this research project will culminate in a much more robust and comprehensive modeling approach for predicting outcomes in NET patients receiving PRRT, thus holding significant potential for improving clinical patient management by avoiding ineffective treatment delivery and side effects. This work could result in a paradigm shift and allow its use in recently completed large trials like NETTER-1 and NETTER-2 and may also open the door for designing more personalized approach in trials for populations where this is currently not approved e.g.: lung NETs, retreatment, rare NETs by allowing better selection of patients likely to have high benefit predicted from this work as well as direct research efforts towards improving outcomes in those with low benefit scores.

The BTSI award is a two-year, $100,000 grant made possible through generous support from the Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation (NETRF). The purpose of the BTSI Award is to encourage early career scientists in a fellowship or new faculty appointment to pursue research focused on neuroendocrine tumors.

“NETRF is proud to collaborate with NANETS to support Dr. Fernandes’ research”, said Elyse Gellerman, CEO of NETRF. “This project has the potential to ultimately improve treatment outcomes by better modeling and predicting which patients would benefit from PRRT.”

NANETS is grateful to NETRF, whose tremendous investment and support of this annual research grant have made a difference in the NET medical community and the patients we serve. The NANETS Scientific Review & Research Committee establishes the award criteria, reviews process, and independently selects the recipient.