Rate My Professor James Byrne

James Byrne, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology and Biomedical Engineering in the Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa, where he is a board-certified radiation oncologist and member of the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center. He leads the Byrne Lab, established in 2021. Byrne completed his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, earned his MD and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and finished an internship at UNC. He underwent residency training in the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Boston Children's Hospital. Prior to his current position, he served as a Sakonnett Hope Funds postdoctoral fellow at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Byrne's academic interests center on translational biomedical engineering and oncology, developing technologies such as gas-entrapping materials to deliver therapeutic gases including carbon monoxide for wound healing and cancer therapy, and oxygen to combat tumor hypoxia and boost immunotherapy efficacy. His innovations encompass nanoparticle-delivered mRNA with tardigrade-derived damage-suppressor proteins for protecting normal tissues during radiation therapy, and the Drug-Releasing Intravesical Floating Technology (DRIFT) for intravesical chemotherapy in non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer. Select publications include "Radioprotection of Healthy Tissue via Nanoparticle-Delivered mRNA Encoding for a Damage-Suppressor Protein Found in Tardigrades" (Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2025), "Drug-releasing intravesical floating technology for sequential gemcitabine and docetaxel in non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer" (BJU International, 2025), "Potentiating the effect of immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer using gas-entrapping materials" (2025), "Composite Hyaluronic Acid Gas-Entrapping Materials to Promote Wound Healing" (2025), "Delivery of therapeutic carbon monoxide by gas-entrapping materials" (Science Translational Medicine, 2022), and "Low-Cost, High-Pressure-Synthesized Oxygen-Entrapping Materials to Improve Treatment of Solid Tumors" (2023). He has earned the 2024 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award ($1.5 million DP2 grant), University of Iowa 2024 Early Career Scholar of the Year, 2023 Rising Research Star recognition, V Scholar Award from the V Foundation for Cancer Research, Stead Family Scholars Program investigator status, Outstanding Mentorship in Translational Research award, and placement on the Carver College of Medicine Wall of Scholarship for highly cited publications exceeding 1,000 citations. Additional funding supports his work from the NIH/NCI K08 award, U.S. Department of Defense, Falk Medical Research Trust, and Prostate Cancer Foundation.