John Valliant likes riding “the wave of the future.”
As founder and head of the Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization in Hamilton, Ont., he says that future lies in molecular imaging to detect disease.
“With an x-ray image you see bones. You see anatomy,” he says. “With molecular imaging, what you see is changes in how your body functions and the change in biochemistry. Using that technique you can see diseases really early. To be able to do that you need something called a molecular imaging probe, a chemical compound you inject in a patient and it seeks out the site of disease and then you can detect where that goes.”
Dr. Valliant says the centre’s research and development into those probes is particularly critical as hospitals around the world scramble for dwindling supplies of medical isotopes used to diagnose, monitor or treat cancer, heart or brain disease.
“There are lots of diseases that are not well diagnosed. There’s a high proportion of breast tumours that are not diagnosed by mammography and a high rate of false positives. So we need agents which reduce the number of women going forward with unnecessary biopsies . . . so that need to find an agent that works better than current methods is of equal importance to addressing the isotope shortage.”
Dr. Valliant is internationally recognized for his work in radiopharmaceutical chemistry. But his roots go all the way back to high school chemistry classes.
“I love the basic science of chemistry. At the same time it’s a real reward to see how your basic science can impact people today. A lot of basic science is looking very far in the future. So I get the best of both worlds in that I can look for innovative things that have impact in the future and train students who themselves will probably go on to do greater things.”
Dr. Valliant completed a Bachelor of Science in 1993 and a PhD in 1997, both in chemistry at McMaster University in Hamilton. He then did a post-doctoral fellowship supervised by professors at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He returned to his alma mater in 1999 and is now an associate professor in the departments of Chemistry and Medical Physics and Applied Radiation Sciences. He is also the director of Isotope Research at the McMaster Nuclear Reactor.
Dr. Valliant lives in Ancaster, Ont., with his wife and three children – a daughter who is 6 and three-year-old twin girls. In his free time he likes to run, “spend lots of time with family,” and play the guitar. “But only for my kids. They’re not too critical.”
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