NCSA Receives Cancer Research Funding August 22, 2024 Funding Health SciencesPartnerships Share this page: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email By Megan Meave Johnson Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Most people know someone who has had to cope with cancer – according to the National Cancer Institute, “Approximately 40.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes.” To help reach the goal of better cancer treatment, the Biden-Harris administration recently announced a new round of research funding to the tune of $150 million for the fight against cancer. The awards will be made through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). NCSA’s Health Innovation Program Office (HIPO) is part of a multidisciplinary team of faculty, researchers and clinicians at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.) and the Mayo Clinic that have received up to $33 million of this funding from ARPA-H. Various departments at U. of I, including NCSA, will provide additional investments to the five-year project. The project team will be working toward a specific goal – to improve patient outcomes by integrating new imaging technologies into the surgical process of removing cancerous tumors. It can be tricky to determine the exact margins of a tumor – meaning where the cancer cells stop and healthy cells begin. This occasionally results in more surgical procedures when cancer cells still remain. The hope is that researchers will develop a better way to remove tumors so that 100% of the tumor is removed the first time a patient undergoes treatment. Breast cancer patients would benefit from this research immensely since 30% of those patients end up returning for additional surgery. Boppart’s team is currently using new technology to image cancer. In this image created with the new techniques, a cancer tumor can be clearly seen in purple. From the Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory, “By using optical imaging methods, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT), second harmonic generation (SHG), and multiphoton microscopy, we can probe deep into tissues and characterize the unperturbed native tumor environment in vivo. These methods are all label-free, which means that tissues and live animals can be imaged without the complications of adding exogenous agents.” Credit: Stephen Boppart The project is led by Dr. Stephen Boppart, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering at U. of I. and director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI), who is the principal investigator for the multi-team effort. He is also the Illinois chair of the Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance for Technology-based Healthcare, which was the primary driver for this collaborative multi-institutional project. Boppart is also a professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. HIPO has a long history of collaborating with Boppart and Mayo Clinic, and the Center’s collaborative efforts have resulted in great strides in the field of cancer research. “This award will mean that years’ worth of preliminary technology development at Illinois and early clinical surgical studies at Carle Health will now be able to reach the finish line with an end-solution and fully integrated platform that will be demonstrated in rigorous clinical studies and trials, and will be driven toward commercialization, dissemination and benefit to many cancer patients,” said Boppart. NCSA will receive a significant portion of the award supporting eight full-time staff and advanced computing. Its role is complex, as staff will lend their expertise to a number of aspects of the research – everything from optimization of artificial intelligence (AI) models to the software infrastructure and visualization needed for the project. Colleen Bushell, director of HIPO, is on the leadership committee for the grant and is leading NCSA’s efforts, but the work is truly a team effort, as many experts from NCSA’s Software Directorate will be leading their own teams. We are thrilled to be working with such an experienced group of collaborators on a project that can significantly impact patient care. –Colleen Bushell, HIPO Director, NCSA Jessica Saw, a research scientist with NCSA’s Visual Analytics Group, will fill the role of the Project Requirements Manager, helping to ensure that all the collaborators stay in sync with the functional and usability goals of the system. Matt Berry, lead of the Visual Analytics group at NCSA, will lead the software and front-end implementation team. Lisa Gatzke, User Interface and User Experience(UI/UX) design group lead at NCSA, will head the UI/UX and visualization aspect of the project. Berry and Gatzke’s teams have decades of experience designing and implementing custom interfaces for researchers, and Gatzke and Berry have worked on a number of related projects with Mayo. “The whole software team is very excited: The research is fascinating, the collaborating institutions are world-class, and the impact to patient care will be transformative,” said Berry. “For us as engineers and designers, it’s also a chance to solve a host of compelling problems in computing, data, AI, visualization, UI/UX and more. We’ll be building on all of NCSA’s experience in those areas to advance the state of the art.” Rob Kooper, lead of the Software Design, Delivery and Deployment group, will lead the software infrastructure and AI optimization efforts that will take the models developed by other collaborators and improve their performance speed for use in clinical settings. And finally, Chris Pond, lead of the Research Data Engineering group at NCSA, will head up the data infrastructure team. In this image from the Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory, regular cells are shown. Credit: Stephen Boppart. While people are the Center’s greatest asset, the project will also be able to make use of the many hardware resources at NCSA, including the Center’s HIPAA-compliant research computing resource, Nightingale, if needed. The powerful resources at NCSA are necessary to train complex models and to manage the nearly 30TB of image data created and processed for each patient in the study. NCSA’s team is well-versed in creating similar environments, having worked on projects like the petabyte-scale clustered database system for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) image processing system and the LIMS created for the U. of I. saliva-based COVID-19 test. “We are thrilled to be working with such an experienced group of collaborators on a project that can significantly impact patient care,” said Bushell. “This funding from ARPA-H is different from most other federal funding — the goal is to advance and translate quality research into clinical practice and to include industry partners to ensure the results can be commercialized. The work will be fast-paced and challenging — it’s right up our alley.” You can find greater details about the award and the cancer research here: Tumor removal done right, the first time: An up to $33 million ARPA-H award to bring a new standard of care for precision in surgical interventions ABOUT HIPO Established in 2020, NCSA’s Healthcare Innovation Program Office (HIPO) enables healthcare partnerships that leverage NCSA’s dedicated technology and expertise in areas such as HPC, software development, visualization, data analytics, AI and information security. HIPO guides industry clients and academic researchers to solutions and expertise that meet their data science needs. The people of HIPO are proud partners and stewards of NCSA’s resources, poised to assist users on their journey with NCSA.