Constantin Coussios, PhD, has been appointed as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to biomedical engineering. The award was recently announced in the 2022 Queen’s Birthday Honours List as part of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
Prof. Coussios became the University of Oxford’s first Statutory Chair in Biomedical Engineering in 2011 and has served as Director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering since 2016. He holds BA, MEng, MA, and PhD degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge.
In 2004, he moved to Oxford to take up the very first faculty position in biomedical engineering, following postdoctoral appointments with Prof. Christy Holland in Cincinnati and Prof. Ron Roy in Boston. At Oxford, he founded and leads the Biomedical Ultrasonics, Biotherapy and Biopharmaceuticals Laboratory (BUBBL), a multidisciplinary research and training environment for combinational engineering of biology, chemistry, and medical devices to improve non-invasive therapies and drug delivery under a single roof.
He has worked in therapeutic ultrasound across both thermal and cavitational therapies for the past 20 years, most notably pioneering passive acoustic mapping for cavitation-based treatment monitoring with his student Miklos Gyongy in 2008 and developing the first generation of solid gas-stabilizing cavitation nucleation agents with then post-doctoral researcher (and now Oxford professor) James Kwan in 2013.
Beyond basic research and discovery, he has led and co-led several clinical studies in the field of focused ultrasound, including a first-in-human trial of focused ultrasound-triggered drug delivery from thermosensitive liposomes (Lancet Oncology 2018) that could make a significant difference in the way that liver cancer is treated.
Prof. Coussios was also the lead academic founder of two focused ultrasound companies, OxSonics Ltd. and OrthoSon Ltd. OxSonics is currently conducting clinical trials of cavitation-enhanced drug delivery in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, and OrthoSon is developing a percutaneous minimally invasive technique to treat lower back pain and restore spinal function.
He says, “No honour has ever surprised me more. I am extremely grateful to my amazing students and academic colleagues within the University, to my fantastic co-workers within OrganOx*, OxSonics, and OrthoSon, and to the extraordinary Oxford biomedical innovation ecosystem for enabling the generation and successful translation of new engineering and cross-disciplinary technologies from bench to bedside.”
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Investigator Profile: Constantin Coussios, PhD August 2018
*OrganOx is a company dedicated to revolutionizing organ preservation prior to transplantation, and received Post-Marketing Authorization approval by the FDA for its metra normothermic liver perfusion device in December 2021.