Dr. John Sylvester

Dr. John Sylvester completed both his Medical Degree and specialty training in Radiation Oncology at UCLA. He is board certified in Radiation Oncology by the American Board of Radiology. He was awarded the American Cancer Society Fellowship during his year as chief resident at UCLA. In 1987 he began performing prostate brachytherapy with Drs. Blasko and Grimm in Seattle and joined the Seattle team full time in 1988. He is a member of the American Brachytherapy Society, The American Society of Therapeutic Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), and the American College of Radiology.

He has performed over 2000 prostate brachytherapy procedures and developed and assisted in the development of several technical improvements in the procedure over the past two decades, including how to better visualize the urethra during the procedure and how to optimally utilize R.A.P.I.D. strand. He was the first physician in the U.S.A. to use I¹²⁵ Echo Seed, a more visible (on ultrasound) radioactive seed. He was the lead Seattle investigator in a gene therapy protocol for salvage of external beam radiation therapy failures. He initiated the image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) approach used at the Swedish Cancer Institutes’ Radiation Oncology centers for more precise Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) for prostate cancer. He is the lead investigator in a randomized trial evaluating the addition of hormone therapy to combined radiation therapy and Pd¹⁰³ brachytherapy and is the lead Seattle investigator in the use of the new Cesium radioactive seed. He has published multiple articles and medical textbook chapters on prostate brachytherapy and co-authored and edited The Prostate Cancer Treatment Book.

The above has led to being called upon to present at national and international conferences on prostate cancer on a regular basis. He recently presented the 15-year Seattle results on radioactive seed implantation of the prostate at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the World Congress of Endourology.

Dr. Sylvester co-founded the Seattle Prostate Institute with Dr Grimm in 1997 and served as the Director of Education and Training for 8 years. This organization runs a monthly training program which has trained more physicians in permanent seed implantation of the prostate than any other in the world. It also runs the Annual Advanced Prostate Brachytherapy Conference, held in Seattle yearly.

Currently he is the Director of the Seattle Prostate Institute. He is the Chief Medical Officer of Proqura, an organization developed by the Seattle team which is focused on improving the quality of permanent prostate brachytherapy throughout the world, and has developed a network of over 40 high quality brachytherapy centers nation wide.