From sci-fi dreams to the cutting edge of prostate cancer treatment, Dr. James Wysock tells the story of his roundabout journey to becoming an oncologic urologist... and finding fulfillment in his career.
From sci-fi dreams to the cutting edge of prostate cancer treatment, Dr. James Wysock tells the story of his roundabout journey to becoming an oncologic urologist... and finding fulfillment in his career.
Dr. Wysock: There was in there that punk rock vibe. I did not want to work for Tide or Lucky Charms.
Interviewer: Did you feel, like, disappointed?
Dr. Wysock: Like I was selling out? Yeah, of course. Yeah. No, I mean, so there are those type of pathways where you wouldn't sell out right away, where you could actually try to marry that. And I think that is at play. That is at play. Medicine helps answer that for me. Ultimately.
Narrator: A lot of doctors discover their calling early in life. They might have a family legacy in medicine. They might have an experience that inspires them. For James Wysock, his inspiration came in a very different way. His journey took him into space.
Dr. Wysock: We were designing how to get an Orbiter to Mars
Narrator: Into the kitchen.
Dr. Wysock: The goal was to make Lucky Charm marshmallow last longer in milk
Narrator: And even into vats of bacteria.
Dr. Wysock: My job was to get this one gallon fermenter to grow the E. Coli that had been infused with the genetic information to make hemoglobin. I was like, Look, I need to do something more. I need to be pushing this a little bit further. I want to be involved with something that's going to have a real fundamental impact. I'm Dr. James Wysock at NYU Langone Health, where I'm an Assistant professor in the Department of Urology. I'm also the chief of service for Urology at Bellevue Hospital
Speaker B: For SiriusXM and NYU Langone Health, this is Vital Signs. I'm your host, Rose Reid.
Narrator: I interestingly grew up a lot of places. We went from Indiana to Illinois, back and forth several times. Uh, Texas, which was a big change. Uh, we were from the Midwest, and, uh, Texas is a very different place culturally from the Midwest. And so I was young and we moved there, and it was a big adjustment. And then we moved to Richmond, Virginia. And then ultimately, the final move was back to Illinois for the last two years of my high school. Moving a lot is not easy for a kid, in my perspective. I was already kind of a shy kid. And so every time we moved and sort of like breaking bonds with friends and then trying to reestablish new friendships. It's not only difficult when you're very young, but then as you go through puberty and you start to break into established friend groups or not, it becomes even more challenging. The kids that accepted me when I especially moved in high school were like the punk rock kids because they were already sort of counterculture and they didn't necessarily - I didn't fit in with the jocks and the preps and all these kind of, like, classes of kids that existed back then and those narrow definitions. I sat by myself in the lunchroom because I didn't know anybody. And those guys were, like, actually accepting of me.
Narrator: While school friends and belonging were challenging for Dr. Weisock, he found stability at home with his family.
Dr. Wysock: We had a very tight knit group. Uh, my brother's only like three years younger than me, so we were always paired. And my sister's seven years younger than me. And we had a good relationship that helped kind of keep everything going. We have very vivid imaginations. Cold War era, and there's Star Wars and things like that - G. I. Joe, that were really important for me because when I was alone, these were where my imagination took off. My father took me to see Empire Strikes Back in the theater, and I don't recall the event, I was too young. But my father said I've walked out of there like crazily, excited, and I became Luke Skywalker. And I would answer the phone when relatives would call, and they'd be like, oh, Jimmy, is this you? And I'd be no. This is Luke Skywalker. And so I became immediately drawn to space and science fiction and all the aspects around that. And then in there came this concept of - also probably Cold War driven - Top Gun. Top Gun. I went and saw that movie. I was probably nine or eight or something in that range, and I was blown away by these fighter pilots. And I was like, that's what I want to do. That's exactly what I want to do. And I want to be a fighter pilot, and ultimately an X Wing Starfighter pilot, this type of thing. That's my trajectory.
Narrator: And that’s exactly what he tried to do.
Dr. Wysock: The natural fit for me early on was aerospace engineering, and I was enthusiastic about it. I remember I was doing Aerospace Engineering 101, and it was a cool class. We were designing how to get an orbiter to Mars. What were the equations for that? And they had, uh, sent a rover to Mars already, and so then we looked at pictures of the surface of Mars, some of the earliest pictures that were ever obtained. It's like, wow, this is really cool stuff. But then I met with my advisor and he's like, look, there are no jobs. There's just no jobs. NASA's not hiring, the funding's cut. And then the aerospace industry in general was then all towards weapons. And I didn't necessarily want to do that. I was coming into my education right at that period where aerospace as an industry had lost its glitz.
Narrator: Confronting the realization that his dreams of aerospace engineering - and flying an X Wing against the Empire - weren't going to come true, Dr. Wysock leaned on a subculture that provided belonging, satisfaction, and an opportunity to express his frustrations.
Dr. Wysock: There was this other current of punk rock music and being straight edge and then going to college and being like, I'm not going to be involved in the mainstream frat scene. I'm going to just ride my skateboard to class. What I was drawn to in punk is a very strong ethos towards do it yourself or DIY culture. And in that, even in straight edge, but not even just straight edge, the entire culture, especially at the time in the 90s, was very, very strong DIY. You put out your own records. You were independent. You put out your, uh, zines, and you did the shows yourselves. This is what we were doing. You didn't need mega radio culture to create this scene. In fact, it was a backlash to a lot of that. It was a backlash to the hair bands of 80s, the studio rock and things like that. It was to say, look, let's try to get some granularity around this. So what's very interesting in that arc is that I took engineering, but it didn't have as much passion about it. I really liked it, and I think I'm inclined towards it, but my passion came from trying to tackle bigger issues.
Narrator: From punk to Star Wars to engineering. The core of what Dr. Wysock was searching for was simple doing something important.
Dr. Wysock: I've always sort of been of the mindset, and it's both through experience and teaching that you can do what you want to do, you just have to put the energy into it. I had learned through my early coursework that chemistry was pretty cool. I liked the way chemistry worked. There was something about the math plus the reality of seeing the reactions. And I think this is really important for me as a person - to learn is to see things in action. Maybe that's why I also liked aerospace engineering, because you see it in action, you fire a rocket, you see the rocket go up, and you know that the principles that you're learning on paper actually have real world implications. And so I said, you know what? I'll switch to chemical engineering. And I did. I found early on in the lab in chemistry how very, uh, interesting and sensitive it all is. What it was was that we were given models of all the, uh, molecules, and you had to build them physically and then model the reaction on these sort of ball and stick figures. And I remember that was one of the coolest pieces of equipment I got in my early college education was this - you have to go to the bookstore, you get books, but then you also get this model set, and you figure out and you see this three dimensional representation of the molecule. And it's just like, uh, it totally – it comes to life. There is an art to it, which is really understated because it is science. But there's elements to it where you have to sort of learn by experience. And then ultimately, I think it drifted over into biochemistry. As I was working in a lab at the Beekman Laboratory, there was a professor there, Stephen Sliger, who was doing work on blood substitutes. So he was making what's called recombinant hemoglobin. And this would be a huge improvement if we could actually make hemoglobin so that you wouldn't need to do transfusions, et cetera. And I got hooked up with some grad students in that lab. And my job was to get this one gallon fermenter to work to grow the E. Coli that had been infused with the genetic information to make hemoglobin and then grow all this E. Coli in a fermentation center. And that was amazing because that was really when I started to see science coming to life.
Narrator: But once again, his curiosity and dreams crashed head on into reality, and gainful employment became a necessity.
Dr. Wysock: Ultimately, as you go through your engineering undergraduate pathway, you are looking towards what you're going to do after graduation. Look, uh, there are loans, and I had loans, and my family didn't have money to send me to undergrad, so I had to take loans, I knew, and my obligation was ultimately to get some sort of job. And I needed that money. I needed that income because I needed to support myself and pay off these loans. And there was no way around that. So I needed that concrete reality.
Narrator: And nothing pays the bills for newly graduated chemical engineers quite like the consumer product industry.
Dr. Wysock: I interviewed for a, uh, summer internship with General Mills, and they have a lot of engineering in their food processing. And the creation of your Cheerios, your Betty Crocker, and all of their array of cereal products requires a high level of chemical engineering processing. So I worked there as chemical engineer, and my task was when I got in there to work on Lucky Charms Marshmallows.
Lucky Charms commercial: Kids - now, for the first time ever, it's a marshmallow inside a marshmallow. The stars and a balloon! Wow! Doubly delicious. It's the magical part of a complete breakfast. New! In specially marked boxes of Lucky Charms.
Dr. Wysock: And that was a really cool project, I thought. And it turned out to be a very challenging project. And the goal was at the time, to make the Lucky Charm marshmallow last longer in milk. They called this bowl life. And it was a process where I was dumping vats of high fructose corn syrup into these mixers. A lot of hot water, a lot of sugar, different sugar crystals, and then measuring my results. And ultimately… a project like that you probably wouldn't solve in a summer internship anyway. But I took a good crack at it and ultimately ended up getting three cavities at the end of the summer that - I had to go to the dentist before I went back to school. And I had three cavities from eating all these marshmallows that summer. But, uh, it was a really great experience. But it did crystallize something for me professionally and personally, that I did not want to work on consumer products. It just felt empty in a lot of ways. Right here I was taking all this science and engineering and I was just trying to figure out how to make this marshmallow last longer. And the product probably is not good for you. You would work on a product that was packaged and put on a store shelf and it just was like - That's what I'm going to do with my career or my education? And it just was hollow. I just couldn't find any passion for it.
Narrator: Trying to live an altruistic life, but also a self sufficient life was proving difficult. Until one day, late in his last undergraduate semester
Dr. Wysock: One day there was in the hallway an ad for Merck Pharmaceuticals coming to do a recruitment, uh, meeting and talk to people and collect resumes. And so I went to that. But as I was know, look, organic chemistry was cool. And in the sort of backdrop to all this is I had to fill out a bunch of elective space in my education. So I took biochem, which was really cool, and I had to take physiology as one - I elected to take physiology as one of my electives. And I started to see all these other really interesting aspects to chemistry that were in engineering. And I thought biochemical engineering is pretty cool. And that's how I ended up doing the blood products work. And I was seeing there was other bridges and Merck sort of struck me as a way to do engineering that may not be so consumer product oriented. It's the pharmaceutical industry. You have a different goal. Your goal is to make a therapeutic. Now, some of those therapeutics are also of questionable value. But there are, within those pathways work towards real life saving and life changing medications. And so I was like, you know what? Maybe I'll head down that pathway. It was totally different from General Mills. It was totally different from the consumer product companies that I'd interviewed with. I was enthusiastic about it because I saw it as a way to answer the conundrum of what am I going to do with myself that's meaningful, that is not selling out to these corporate consumer product pathways. I approached Merck. I got an interview and they invited me to come to Rahway, New Jersey. I got the offer and I took it. And I thought, this is the best pathway for me at the time. So my day to day was interesting. It was, uh, split between doing work in a laboratory where you'd work on the process that the chemist had developed. It then was also spent working in what are called pilot plants, which are small factories and small versions of the scale up of the process. It's a 24/7 environment where things are running around the clock and you actually do get put on shift work on occasion. So when you're running a large version of the process, you might be overnight. I mean, literally, you have to make sure you get all the details right. And it's so weird how this resonates in my future career and it was kind of at play already. And I was sort of learning these skill sets that you have to really get into the process and get on the ground and be there to see it and feel it and understand what's going on. And that's critical to my understanding how I can help. But ultimately, that's why when I was an engineer, I was like, look, I need to do something more. I need to be pushing this a little bit further. I want to be involved with something that's going to have a real fundamental impact.
Narrator: Even though he was working on pharmaceutical therapeutics that could provide real help for people, something was missing.
Dr. Wysock: The interesting aspect on this is that the process chemist is by definition a PhD chemist, and I was a Bachelor's of Science chemical engineer. And you need to talk on the same level with them. You need to be respected - to go back to them and say, hey, your process may not be right. I need you to change this, because this is what I'm seeing on the other side when I scale it up tenfold. So there is a pathway at Merck for you to get your chemical engineering PhD while you're working. They'll pay for it. In fact, that's the career ladder for the research chemical engineer. And I wasn't opposed to that. So I started going to Rutgers at night to take my chemical engineering classes, and it was there that it started to happen that I started to say, look, this chemical engineering pathway is interesting, but I'm doing this after hours, and I don't have the passion for it. I do not want to do more of the theoretical writing out chemical reactions, all the math work involved. And, you know, and I couldn't see it again. Here's the problem. I can't see it in reality. And so I was losing this sort of passion for that. And I was sitting on the couch one night with my book open, and I had Dateline on, and Sam Donaldson was interviewing Jeff Bezos, and they were in his car. It was like a Honda, I think, or something, and they're driving out in Washington State, and it was sort of a flat environment. And he's like, why would you ever form this very risky, unprofitable internet startup company called Amazon?
Dateline: Maybe it was his intensity, or maybe it was the way he talks.
Dr. Wysock: And Jeff Bezos is like, look, it's very simple. I make all the decisions in my life through a regret minimization framework.
Sam Donaldson: Does that mean, um, I want to live my life so that in a few decades from now, I'm not going to regret it?
Jeff Bezos: That's exactly right. Uh, I want to have lived my life in such a way that when I'm 80 years old, I've minimized the number of regrets that I have.
Dr. Wysock: And if I didn't try this, I would regret it the rest of my life to the degree that would be fundamentally problematic for me. A classmate of mine who was a pre med, and I don't know where she ended up, but her name was Dinah Koslowskis or Dana Koslowskis. And she and I were doing a set of inorganic chemistry homework. And I remember this very clearly because, uh, it just struck me one day. She said, we're doing them together. She was pre med. She was a cool premed. I liked her. And we were doing some homework together, and she was like, you should go to medical school. You'd be good at it. That's what she told me. And for some reason, I was like, it stuck with me. But I was like, no, that's not for me. But it crystallized something and started a kernel, right? It was strange, right? I didn't even recognize it. All engineering core curriculum is essentially the same as premedical education. Calculus classes, organic chemistry, physics. I think over the years, I started to, uh, put it together that, hey, that is a pathway that I'd be interested in. And then when I saw that interview, I said, you know what? I've got to figure out what it would take to apply to medical school, and I'm going to just at least look into it. Because if I don't, I will regret it for the rest of my life. I think that maybe I was afraid. I don't know. Maybe I was afraid to try. There had been no doctors in our family. No one there's no preconception that you could do that. In fact, it was probably quite the opposite. I was already taking loans to go to undergrad. I couldn't go to graduate school unless it was paid for by someone. I couldn't certainly go to medical school. That was way out of the league. Those were all the realities that I'd, uh, sort of grown up with as an understanding. It was, get your engineering degree, get your job. Done. Everybody was worried about me going to medical school, and they were primarily worried because of the amount of debt that I would take on. And it was true. I have the debt today that, ah, didn't go away. That reality is very true. But the idea was that was an unrealistic pathway for me. In fact, this was at play when I went to medical school because my grandfather, my dad's father was like, don't go. It's not a good idea. And he was, uh, such an important, I think, father figure for the whole family. That was important for me to be like, you know what? That's valid criticism, but I'm going to do it. Potentially even irresponsible pathway. And I would just keep that door closed. Removing myself from that sort of mill that the undergraduate experience really exposes that you're really just in this salmon charge upstream, trying to get through that next hurdle, and everybody's throwing elbows. Uh, I got out of that, and I was able to, in calm water, sort of reflect and say, this is a goal over there that I could go for. And if I don't go for it, all the reasons to not to are now not active. I've got a job. I've got the potential to guide and break. I was on my own now. I wasn't living with my parents anymore. So a lot of those sort of pressures are gone. And I'm unfettered to think, hey, I could do that. I think somewhere in that evolution, it was necessary, because I would have never come to that conclusion earlier. Period, I got into medical school. I got good scores to get into medical schools, et cetera. And I got into Northwestern, which was incredible. Northwestern was a great school.
Narrator: He was now committed to the course of becoming Dr. Wysock. And it wasn't the calculus, physics, or biology that piqued his interest. It was the hands on experience.
Dr. Wysock: Anatomy was a life changing event. You get to go in this environment, and it's a tradition that goes back so far in medicine to allow you to understand what the human body really is. And people donate their bodies. And so it's a very solemn and reverential part of the medical curriculum. And, uh, it allows you to really start to explore and see. And I was really into this. It's very similar to that chemical, uh, chemistry kit. You've got something right there in your hands, and you have to figure it out. And quite honestly, it's hard to figure out. It didn't tell me I was a surgeon, but it made medical school real. It made medical school something that you wouldn't get any other way. And so that was really amazing.
Narrator: And even more hands on is not only learning anatomy, but learning how to fix anatomy.
Dr. Wysock: Surgery has a reputation as being aggressive, tough, mean, not a pleasant place to be. Surgeons are jerks. They're abrasive. They're like these terrible people to be around. People get yelled at at all times. So as a med student, your preconception is just get in there, keep your mouth shut, and don't get caught in the crossfire. So you're a little nervous about surgery. But you know what? I'm like that's fine, I'm sure. But it's going to be interesting. There's going to be some components to this that are very unique. We were given a paper, and it said, okay, you're starting surgery. You're going to do general surgery, obviously, but two of the months you need to do subspecializations of general surgery. And here are your options vascular surgery, orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, ears, nose and throat, and urology. I had no concept, um, of what a urologist does. But my preconception was I knew it probably was not comfortable. So it's like, probably nothing that would be interesting at the outlet. Urine and prostates. Okay, sure. And I showed up at, uh, Dr. James Holland's office of Evanston Hospital. Immediately, he impressed me with this ability to sort of just connect with these men and talk about the most intimate topics right away in a way where they immediately trusted him and he was down to earth with them. And there was this communication component that was really interesting. So the next week, I went to the operating room again on urology, and it was to do a prostatectomy, a radical prostatectomy. And this is a complete removal of the prostate gland and the lymph nodes around it. So it's a cancer operation. It was as scary as I thought it would be. But I got into that operating room and, uh, I was with a resident and the attending, and we did the surgery. And every moment of that surgery was so intense, so focused, so crystal clear. You're under these bright lights and every move felt slowed down. Time was, like, so focused. And I don't think I came off the adrenaline high from that for a day or two. I was on such an edge coming out of that operation. And everything I did, every motion of my body, I thought I was potentially doing something wrong that could cause this to go wrong. That's how tense that I felt. I think everybody else felt fine, but I felt so tense. And I came out of that day and that experience and driving back to this, like, what happened today? That was insane! That just blew my mind, what happened. I was part of this stream, this event, and it's so focused, it's so orchestrated. Every little motion, every movement in the operating room, every piece of the whole thing is aimed towards this next step. And it's almost like an oral history gets passed down. I mean, how do people learn how to do this? It's not something you could ever know. You have to be shown. It's a, uh, science, and it's an art, and it's a feel. And when you watch it happen, even if you don't know what's going on, you know that there's this huge, great process occurring. It feels almost like, uh, a dance, in a way. Almost like an act. It's just like every part of it flows. And there's an elegance to that. And that was a very important moment because then I knew I wanted to do surgery. But it didn't necessarily mean that I wanted to do urology. It just meant this type of medical action is something I think I would want as part of my career, right? This is something I'm gravitating towards. I felt the pull. Everything distills down into that moment, into that person's body, and even though they're asleep and they're a human, you are not looking at it that way. You are just looking at each of those parts of the surgical field that you're working on. And this is a, uh, challenge with surgery, right? Because you do have to become that focused, and everything you're doing in that spot will have profound impact on someone's life in many ways. Look, cancer surgery can work. It is amazing. If you can cure someone - and I'll use cure in quotation marks - with a surgery, and that's a fundamental principle of cancer care. If that can work, I, uh, can't imagine doing anything better than that. That's great. And if I can do that without harming someone, even better. So urology started to really bubble up. And what's interesting is there's a concept that urology is a very difficult field to get into because it's a small field and so it's like, jeez, well, I may not get in to urology, so who knows? But I'll try. And it ended up working out. And ultimately what I did is I finished my six years of residency and I came down to NYU to do my fellowship because there was something really cool happening here. And I did the fellowship two years here, which set me up for where I am now.
Narrator: Dr. Wysock moved on to New York Presbyterian to join a new and growing urology department where he was able to apply and further develop techniques he learned in his fellowship.
Dr. Wysock: And I was able to really start becoming a urologic oncologist in that environment and it was great. I was able to see the most incredibly diverse patient population that you could conceive of. Every day was great. There was a lot of, uh, excitement. We were growing this department. We were able to implement some of the things that I had done during fellowship with what we call targeted prostate biopsy. And I was starting to really get experience with being an attending, which is another big step to start doing things on your own and go through those learning curves. And while I was doing that, though, there were some changes occurring potentially here at NYU. And some people were shifting. And then Herb Lepore reached out to me and basically said, look, do you want to come back and take over the chief position at Bellevue and work on the prostate biopsy work and the prostate treatment work that we've been working on that you were doing in your fellowship? Because we have this, uh, opportunity. And you know, it was a difficult decision as well. But again, regret minimization if I had turned that down, I think I would have regretted it a lot. And I just said, look, yeah, I do want to do that. And I very quickly, two years into being attending, made a transition back to NYU.
Narrator: While Dr. Wysock's career path shifted, prostate cancer diagnosis technology was in transition too.
Dr. Wysock: So one of the things that sort of was happening in my training, that one of my mentors in residency was doing was getting a lot of MRI of the prostate. MRI of the prostate was a new way to look at the prostate. And I started to look at these MRI. We didn't really know what the application was, but it was starting to give us a look at the prostate gland in a way we had never seen. I was very intrigued by it because it was really cool to have a picture to start to relate to what you were doing anatomically. It was separating this gap, right? You do surgery a lot of times with an exploratory sense, really. You're going off of anatomical landmarks to a place where you know where things should be, but you may not know exactly what they're going to be like because you have no way of knowing. But here was now a picture to say, hey, this is what it really looks like. And you can pre-, then plan and you can make things a little bit more predictable. But here you have now a picture and you can say, well, this is the likely site, let's target it. We call that a targeted biopsy because prior to that, and even still today, the standard is to just do a bunch of blind biopsies, sample all around the gland and see what you get. A little bit of an expedition. Not that accurate Full of some flaws.
Narrator: And it isn't just the diagnosis that Dr. Wysock is focused on. He aims to take this technology from imaging and examining all the way to treating prostate cancer.
Dr. Wysock: I think we have a very, very good foundation for this. We are now running a couple prospective registries looking at men who have an identifiable tumor on MRI that we confirm with a biopsy and it's limited to the MRI location. We can actually place treatment into that part of the prostate and that part of the prostate alone. And we are assessing on how well that's going to control cancer. Because when you can limit the treatment to just the tumor and not affect the normal or benign prostate that has no cancer in it, you can drastically lower the side effect profile. And this gives men a lot of options then down the line to avoid some of the - I'll call it toxicity - but the side effects of what we do when we treat the prostate.
Narrator: Traditional prostate cancer treatment includes either removing the prostate radiation treatment or both. These treatments can cause very painful and unfortunate side effects like incontinence, chronic pain and sexual dysfunction. To be able to treat prostate cancer and minimize these side effects would be a real game changer.
Dr. Wysock: So ultimately, I think what we're trying to pursue in these new treatment paradigms is broadly described as focal therapy. And what that in essence means is to take an energy source or some sort of tissue destructive force and direct it to a prostate tumor in a very precise manner. Now that energy source comes in many different forms and that does include using energies such as a laser to ablate the tissue, or what we call high intensity focused ultrasound, which is an acronym we call HIFU. It's a funny name, but what that is, is essentially a very focused ultrasound signal which actually vaporizes tissue. And then, uh, there's one called irreversible electroporation, which is also a very, uh, cool technology where you basically, um, depolarize cell membranes and the cells die. And this is an athermal technique, or you don't use heat or cold. And then finally, what is essentially the workhorse of our efforts right now is cryotherapy or cryoablation, where you take a needle and put it into the prostate tumor and you drop the temperature of the tissue to such a degree that it will die. You basically are creating internal frostbite and it permanently will destroy these cells that get frozen. So you're just basically creating little ice blocks inside the prostate that surround the tumor. And then you thaw it out and it's not going to survive and it turns to scar tissue. So these are a growing, uh, armamentarium of technologies here to start employing the fact that I can target a tumor. And now what is going to be the ideal energy to put into each of those tumor locations and what are going to be the ideal, uh, tumors to treat, as well as what are the ideal ways to follow up those tumors - are all the questions we're trying to address. So at this point, my passion and my drive is towards improving prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment so that we can ideally identify a prostate cancer tumor when it's early and localized to the prostate in a small area that I can then place a treatment just into the tumor and eliminate the tumor while preserving the rest of the normal prostate and thus helping reduce prostate cancer uh, progression while preserving normal quality of life function for men long term.
Narrator: Dr. James Wysock, a punk rock, anti corporate, anti sellout, straight edge aerospace and chemical engineer, is changing the paradigm of prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment. It just took the right set of circumstances for him to realize that where he belonged was not behind the controls of an X Wing or developing high tech marshmallows, but where he could use his hands to do his best work.
Dr. Wysock: Reflecting over the last year, and I think this is coming out of COVID a lot of this reflection. It's just like, I've just been able to sort of put this together like this. And I even told my wife, I was like, wow, just thinking about … you know, you get bogged down in the day to day sometimes. But now I look as a whole and like, a little bit of perspective on it. I'm like, wow, this is really cool. Nothing really goes that bad in the day to day. Yeah, you always have work stress. I couldn't find a job or a career path that I think would be better fundamentally. There's always pros and cons to your day to day, but by doing these talks, I've been like, wow, uh, yeah, I'm really happy with what my choices have been. So it's been kind of weirdly therapeutic in a way.
Dr. Wysock: So we have a whole array of clinical trials that are ongoing in the NYU Department of Urology. They focus not just on prostate cancer, but on a variety of other things, but to focus specifically on what we're doing with prostate ablation or focal therapy. We have ongoing registries, which mean, uh, that men can get these treatments, and then we enroll them in a rigorous follow up for Cryoablation and HIFU. Uh, we are opening a prospective trial called the Preserve Trial to evaluate the NanoKnife technology. So these are all ongoing, and, uh, for men that are interested in this who may have had a diagnosis of prostate cancer, we were happy to evaluate them and see if they could qualify for one of these trials.
Narrator: If you're interested in participating in clinical trials at NYU Langone Health, or at your local research hospital, go to Clinicaltrials.gov to find one that could be right for you.
Narrator: Vital Signs is a co production of NYU Langone Health and SiriusXM. The podcast is produced by Jim Bilodeau, Jennifer Hofmann, and Keith King. This episode was written and sound designed by Jim Bilodeau. SiriusXM's Executive Producer is Beth Ameen. Don't miss a single episode of Vital Signs and subscribe for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To hear more from the world-renowned doctors at NYU Langone Health, tune in to Doctor Radio on SiriusXM Channel 110 or listen anytime on the SXM app. To get in touch with our production team, email vitalsigns@siriusxm.com. For the Vital Signs podcast. I'm Rose Reed. Join us next time as we bring you stories of medicine made personal.