A San Antonio physician is being honored for his breakthrough work in cancer research and military medicine. Dr. George Peoples is being singled out as an innovator.
A crowd of more than 500 people gathered at the BioMed SA Innovator Award presentation. Peoples is a former military doctor who’s currently working in the emerging field of cancer immunotherapy.
"We try to engage the patient’s own immune system to fight their cancer," Peoples said. "I’m a surgical oncologist by training. And so I’ve worked with cancer patients for the last 25 years. I’ve removed a lot of cancers. But that is something I can do literally one patient at a time. The research that I’ve been involved with, cancer immunotherapy, I think is really the next frontier of cancer care."
In essence, teaching a person’s body to prevent recurrence could keep the disease in check, making it more like a chronic illness than a killer.
While in the military, Peoples helped develop frontline surgical techniques that saved the lives of wounded warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. BioMed SA president Ann Stevens says Peoples is a great example of the city’s diverse medical industry.
"He is an innovator in two of the strongest areas of competency in our city, military medicine and cancer research," Stevens commented.
Healthcare and bioscience is San Antonio’s largest industry, employing one in six workers with an economic impact of more than 30 billion dollars a year.
