A University of Washington-led research team could receive up to $21.1 million as part of a federal grant aiming to reduce cancer deaths in the U.S. — a goal President Joe Biden has championed for years and revisited Tuesday.
The total award amounts to about $150 million and comes from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, Biden announced during a visit to New Orleans with first lady Jill Biden. The pair toured medical facilities that receive funding to investigate cancer treatments, including Tulane University, which is also one of eight research teams around the U.S. that will receive grant dollars, according to The Associated Press.
The funding is part of Biden’s “moonshot” initiative, which aims to find a cure for the deadly disease and cut U.S. cancer fatalities by 50% over the next 25 years.
“We’re moving quickly because we know that all families touched by cancer are in a race against time,” Biden said Tuesday. “I’m a congenital optimist about what Americans can do.”
In addition to UW and Tulane, the grant awardees come from Dartmouth College; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Cision Vision in Mountain View, California.
Each team will be focused on ways to help surgeons more successfully remove tumors in people with cancer.
Cancer is the second-highest cause of death of people in the U.S. after heart disease. About 2 million new cancer cases are diagnosed in the country every year. This year alone, the American Cancer Society estimates 611,720 people will die of cancer diseases, according to the AP.
At UW, the grant tasks researchers with building an advanced microscopy system to help guide cancer removal surgeries in the operating room, said Jonathan Liu, director of UW’s molecular biophotonics laboratory and lead of this part of the project.
“It’s usually hard to get this level of funding,” Liu said Tuesday following the announcement. “What that enables us to do is to really push things more into the clinic, work with a bigger team at multiple sites … and work with our companies so that we can accelerate the translation of these technologies into clinics.”
Liu will lead researchers at UW, which could receive up to $9 million over the next five years, as well as teams at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Harvard Medical School and Seattle-based Alpenglow Biosciences Inc. The four teams, in total, will receive up to $21.1 million as long as they “stay on track” and milestones are met, Liu said.
The funding for the project is important because more advanced technology is needed to help surgeons better see how much tissue to cut out when removing a tumor, Liu said. During breast cancer surgeries, studies show surgeons fail to completely remove the tumor about 20% of the time on average, Liu said. For head-and-neck cancer surgeries, the percent rises to 40%, he said.
“They’re balancing this desire to remove all the tumor, but also not be too aggressive with how much normal tissue around the tumor they’re removing,” he said. “They’re using their sense of sight and touch, but it’s sort of a guessing game.”
“We’re trying to make sure surgeons can do the job right the first time and not have to repeat surgeries,” he added.
The system Liu and his team are building, he said, will look similar to a document scanner and have a high-resolution microscope that can scan cells to see if they’re cancerous or not. If they’re not, it indicates the surgeon has gotten rid of all the tumor. If they are, more tissue needs to be removed.
“That’s the big challenge, to have that microscopic resolution over very large areas of tissue,” Liu said.
AI will play a large role in the data analysis portion of the system, since a computer can scan cells much faster than a pathologist can, he said. While it can generally take a few days for a pathologist to look at tissue from a cancer surgery, Liu hopes they can get turnaround time to under 15 minutes.
“We’re trying to tell [the surgeon] before the operation’s over, so they can clean up the surgery and finish the job before sending the patient home,” he said.
Once UW teams have developed a prototype of the scanning system, Alpenglow will create a more professional-grade and cost-effective version. Then, the technology will get sent to clinics at UW Medicine and Vanderbilt for Phase 2, or the “clinical validation studies,” which will tell researchers how well their product works, Liu said.
Last year, the first lady stopped in Seattle during her national tour of prominent cancer research facilities. She spent several hours at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, which serves as UW Medicine’s cancer program, and toured its metastatic microenvironment lab, which aims to profile enough cells to better understand their biology.
“They are the secret weapons,” Biden said of the lab researchers during her visit. “I’m just magnifying the message. You’re all giving people hope.”
On Tuesday, Liu expressed excitement about the new round of funding.
“Ultimately these types of research projects are very expensive if you want to do them well and get good data to support your technology,” he said. “They funding really helps.”
