10/22/2026
Founders Week 2026: David J. Ramsay Entrepreneur of the Year Graeme Woodworth, MD, FAANS, FACS
The University of Maryland School of Medicine neurosurgeon stands at the leading edge of innovation in treating brain cancer with focused ultrasound, extending lives and giving patients hope for better outcomes.
Woodworth’s research aims to improve the outcomes of patients with brain cancer by developing innovative therapies and therapeutic delivery approaches in neuro-oncology that ultimately will be applied to malignancies in other human organs.
He designed and led the first U.S. clinical trials to test the safety and feasibility of using focused ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier to treat brain tumors. This work set the foundation for Lotus Neuro, a company that is advancing focused ultrasound and drug combination therapies for brain diseases such as glioblastoma and Alzheimer’s disease.
The difficulty of treating brain cancer is high because surgery alone cannot remove all of the tumor due to what Woodworth called “invasive tentacles” woven into the fabric of the brain, where removing them would harm the patient’s brain functions.
“In neurosurgery, we walk that tightrope of getting as close as we can to taking out everything we possibly can but without causing a new functional deficit,” he said. “So that conundrum of trying to remove as much as possible yet knowing we’d never get all of it through surgery was the problem, but it was a problem I wanted to commit myself to solving.
“Therefore, getting drugs to reach those distant brain tumor cells that are so deeply connected with the brain, and to treat them successfully — again, without hurting the brain at the same time — became the challenge.”
Woodworth is the Howard M. Eisenberg, MD Distinguished Professor of Neurosurgery and Chair, Department of Neurosurgery, at UMSOM.
He also is director of the Brain Tumor Program at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, co-founder and co-director of the University of Maryland Medical System Neuroscience Network, and a member of the executive committee of the University of Maryland-Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery.
