Avnesh Thakor, MD, PhD: Powering a New Era of Image-Guided Healing 

Imagine using soundwaves from outside the body to destroy a tumor. No incision. No scalpel. No recovery. Just focused energy, guided with pinpoint precision, eliminating disease while leaving healthy tissue untouched. It sounds like science fiction. At Stanford, it is already happening. 

Last year, a child arrived at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford with a painful bone tumor causing them to walk with a limp. Dr. Avnesh (Ave) Thakor and the pediatric interventional radiology team treated the tumor using high-intensity focused soundwaves—the same principle as a magnifying glass concentrating the energy from sunlight to a single point. The child walked out the same day, tumor free. 

This is the world of interventional radiology (IR), and Dr. Thakor is one of its most visionary pioneers. 

What Is Interventional Radiology? 

A traditional radiologist uses imaging to detect disease. A surgeon treats it with a scalpel. An interventional radiologist does both — using advanced imaging as a GPS system to guide minimally invasive procedures through the body’s own vessels and pathways, reaching any organ with extraordinary precision. Through incisions sometimes no wider than a grain of rice, Dr. Thakor and his team can unblock vessels, deliver therapies directly to tumors, stop life-threatening bleeding, and treat conditions that were once untreatable. The result: faster recovery, less pain, and better outcomes for children. 

A decade ago, Dr. Thakor and his team built Stanford’s pediatric IR program from the ground up. Today it is one of the most advanced in the world, acting as a force multiplier across nearly every specialty at Packard Children’s Hospital. But for Dr. Thakor, what’s possible for children today is only the beginning. 

Mateo’s Story: Right Place, Right Time 

Last October, four-year-old Mateo* fell on a mason jar at his grandparent’s home. The jar shattered, and the glass sliced open his abdomen, lodging fragments deep in his internal organs. Surgeons at a nearby hospital couldn’t find the source of his continued bleeding and his condition was deteriorating fast. There was no time for surgery. It was interventional radiology—or nothing. 

Mateo was transferred to Packard Children’s Hospital, where Dr. Thakor rushed him from the scanner to the IR suite. Using an angiogram to map every bleeding vessel in the liver, he guided specialized catheters to place tiny coils at each bleeding point — stopping the hemorrhage while preserving blood flow to the rest of the liver. The surgery took less than three hours, and the incision was just two millimeters. 

“Cases like this would have very different outcomes elsewhere,” Dr. Thakor reflects. But Mateo was in the right place at the right time — and today, he’s back home with his sister, returning to the hard work of being a kid.

*Identifying details changed to protect privacy.  

The Path Forward: Precision Delivery 

Precision diagnosis identifies disease. Precision treatment targets it. But one of the most common reasons promising therapies fail is simpler than it sounds: they never reach their intended destination. Dr. Thakor is building a new pillar of precision medicine — precision delivery — to solve that problem. 

Soundwave Therapies 
Low-intensity soundwaves can prime tumors to respond to therapy, stimulate regeneration in injured organs, and open microscopic pathways in blood vessels to deliver treatments with unprecedented precision. Dr. Thakor is preparing to launch a clinical trial within the next few years to translate discovery into therapies for patients. 

Bioengineered Scaffolds for Cell Therapy 
Dr. Thakor’s lab is developing bioengineered scaffolds that can be precisely delivered to specific areas in the human body to support organ or cell function. One example: bioscaffolds that can support the survival and function of pancreatic islet cells to restore insulin production, which has the potential to free children with diabetes from insulin injections entirely. Philanthropy could take this exciting cell therapy research to the next stage. 

3D-Printed Pediatric Devices 
In collaboration with experts in 3D printing, Dr. Thakor’s lab is creating dissolvable devices custom-built for each child’s anatomy—designed to support healing and safely disappear as the child grows. Through a unique collaboration with Stanford engineering labs, we have the infrastructure and expertise to drive an entirely new direction in pediatric surgical device development, right-sizing these devices for every child.