The University of Washington in Seattle will receive up to $21.1 million out of $150 million awarded to researchers across the country in a new phase of the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative led by President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden.
This latest round of funding, announced Tuesday, is focused overall on improving the success of tumor-removal surgeries.
The UW is one of three universities, along with Tulane University and Rice University, that were awarded funding to develop new ways of visualizing individual cells on the surface of a tumor after its removal.
“With these advances, if successful, a surgeon will be able to examine the surface of the removed tissue and assess whether more cancer cells remain in the patient before the surgery is complete,” the White House said as part of its announcement. “These projects will generate solutions that will be used in operating rooms, in real-time, and without the need for an on-site pathologist.”
The award is based on work from the lab of University of Washington Mechanical Engineering Professor Jonathan Liu, aiming for faster and more complete removal of cancer tumors during single procedures.
“Building on the technologies developed in Liu’s lab, the goal is to develop an intraoperative ‘flatbed scanner,’ which would be located in the operating room and used to comprehensively image the margin surfaces of surgical specimens within 15 minutes of their removal,” this UW article explains. “The images will assist surgeons in determining whether the entire tumor was removed, and if not, where they should continue to resect.”
Collaborators include Alpenglow Biosciences and Harvard Medical School, with major clinical studies at UW Medicine and Vanderbilt University.
The funding comes from the the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which has invested more than $400 million over the past two years to accelerate prevention, detection, and treatment.
The overall goal of the Cancer Moonshot initiative is reduce the cancer death rate by at least half by 2047 and improve the experience for people affected by cancer.