He has made Monaco’s Centre Hospitalier Princesse Grace (CHPG) a reference for interventional radiology by confronting suffering and disease, continually pushing back the boundaries of medicine for his patients.
The Head of Radiology at CHPG prefers imagination, atypicality and small steps sideways that can change everything to unduly conformist certainties and all too obvious achievements! From his childhood in Alsace to adopting Monaco as his home, he has become a pioneer in the world of interventional radiology, receiving several distinctions from French and European learned societies for his work and innovations. "By using imaging tools as guidance in real time, scanners in the main, we can perform surgical interventions in a minimally invasive way such as destroying tumours, treating pain and setting fractures," enthuses this devotee. In 2019, he and his team performed more than 5,500 operations.
Innovation: a state of mind, the keyword
Philippe Brunner may have been the first to treat breast cancer with radiofrequency ablation, but he also invented a tool that allows access to the confines of the body, to organs and structures that were previously inaccessible. "I was running at night on the Basse Corniche between Monaco and Nice, and I was thinking about all those straight needles we used in interventional radiography when everything in the world is curved. That's how the curved needle was born.’’ An idea and then a concept that he has since patented worldwide. Among the other innovative techniques developed by Brunner, let’s not forget cryotherapy for eradicating breast, kidney and liver tumours with the cold! A minimally invasive, virtually painless and highly effective technique that has revolutionised the management of tumours. "Interventional radiology is certainly the medical speciality that has seen, and is still seeing major upheavals,’’ he concludes, ‘’but we must always bear in mind the adage: stay curious, stay humble’’.
Par Eve Chatelet
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