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International Award for UFS Department of Nuclear Medicine

07 July 2023 | Story André Damons | Photo Supplied

A research paper by a Senior Lecturer and Medical Specialist in the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the University of the Free State (UFS) has won the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) International Best Abstract Award for South Africa.

The abstract, by Dr Osayande Evbuomwan, was about evaluating the efficacy of a new nuclear medicine radiopharmaceutical in the identification of active disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. It was selected for this award by a special committee at the recently concluded SNMMI 2023 Annual Meeting, which took place between 24 and 27 June in Chicago, USA.

Dr Evbuomwan received the award at the Annual Meeting on 26 June.

“It is a good feeling, and I am proud of the UFS Department of Nuclear Medicine for pulling this off. It is another example that hard work pays,” he says.

Comparing this radiopharmaceutical to ultrasound

Dr Evbuomwan says the research that generated the award-winning abstract was aimed at finding out if the new nuclear medicine radiopharmaceutical for the identification of active disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis can also offer prognostic information. The study concluded that this particular radiopharmaceutical (Tc – 99m glucosamine) is highly sensitive in identifying synovitis (inflammation of the membrane that protects joints), and is capable of offering prognostic information in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

This is the first prospective study to assess the prognostic value of this radiopharmaceutical in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, Dr Evbuomwan says. He is currently working on comparisons of this radiopharmaceutical to ultrasound and clinical evaluation in the identification of active disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. He says there is also ongoing collaboration with the Rheumatology Division of the Internal Medicine Department, which has played a huge role in making this project fruitful.

“This award is an opportunity to put the department and university on the map, with world stage recognition. We believe that as the Nuclear Medicine Department continues to grow in human resources and equipment, the research output will also increase.”

Dr Gerrit Engelbrecht, Clinical Head of the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the UFS, says the whole department is very proud of Dr Evbuomwan’s accomplishments. “What makes his award even more remarkable is that he outperformed candidates from much larger, highly funded institutions,” he says.

This department announced last year the successful treatment outcome of a patient with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (MCRPC) – an advanced stage of prostate cancer – by using Lutetium 177 PSMA (Lu-177 PSMA) therapy. This was initially a case of advanced stage prostate cancer, which had failed first-line chemotherapy, leaving little or no other treatment options.

News Archive

In her inaugural lecture, Prof Helene Strauss explores symbols that reflect our history

2014-02-18

Prof Helene Strauss
The burning tyre – image of promise and disappointment
Photo: Stephen Collett

Prof Helene Strauss did not disappoint in her highly-anticipated inaugural lecture “The Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment: Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in Post-transitional South Africa”. She posed some very challenging ideas on the promises and disappointments that arouse from apartheid. Prof Strauss pointed to the fact that “… a promise must promise to be kept; that is, not to remain spiritual or abstract, but to produce events, new effective forms of action, practice, organisation, and so forth.”

She underscored the message of her lecture by making use of the image of a burning tyre – a symbol commonly associated with apartheid. This act of ‘necklacing’ is closely connected to the violence and protests of that era. Prof Strauss used this image to represent an array of social concerns: global mass protest, modernity and mobility, waste economies and waste management, environmental destruction, as well as poverty and resistance in varied formats.

Some of South Africa’s greatest artists have used the burning tyre in their work, particularlyBerni Searle and Zanele Muhloi. Not only does it trigger the shadow of the damaging past, but “more recently, it has come to figure also in the spectacles of promise and disappointment that have marked the country’s transitional and post-transitional periods,” Prof Strauss remarked.

Prof Strauss focuses her research on these symbolisms in our history because of “the questions that they raise about the emotional cultures produced in the aftermath of apartheid and for the unique contribution that they make to current debates on political and aesthetic activism.”Her passion for this subject comes from the “affective or emotional legacies of various forms of structural inequality, an interest that owes a sizeable debt to postcolonial, queer and feminist critical theory and creative work of the past hundred or so years.”

Prof Strauss accepted a position at the University of the Free Sate in 2011 and currently works in the Department of English. She is part of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme and holds a PhD from the University of Western Ontario. Previously, she held the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada, where she resided for 11 years.

Among the guests were Prof Jonathan Jansen, Profs Botes and Witthuhn, lecturers in the Department of English, members of the Faculty of the Humanities, students and some of Prof Strauss’ colleagues from Canada.

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