(The Center Square) – With just a few months left in office, President Joe Biden’s administration last week announced that the University of Washington is getting up to $21.1 million as part of Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which aims to cut the cancer death rate in half by 2047.
As vice president, in 2016, Biden launched the initiative with the mission to accelerate the rate of progress against cancer.
In Feb. 2022, Biden reignited the effort, funneling hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars to public and private efforts focused on cancer therapeutics, diagnostics, and scientific advances and public health lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.
This latest round of funding, announced Aug. 13, is $150 million in total.
The UW is one of three universities, along with Tulane and Rice Universities, that were awarded part of the funding to develop ways of visualizing individual cells on the surface of a tumor after its removal, to ensure surgeons have removed all traces of the cancer.
The award is based on work by UW Mechanical Engineering Professor Jonathan Liu, whose worked has focused on more complete removal of cancer tumors during the initial surgery.
“We’re developing a specialized microscope that can be placed in the operating room, so that we can visualize the cells at the surface right when they are removed from the patient,” Liu said in an interview with The Center Square.
“The problem is right now they can look at it under a microscope, but it takes a few days,” he noted. “They send it to pathology and the lab where it takes up to a week to analyze the tissue and of course the patient is back home. If the margin is positive, they have to go back in and remove more tissue or do more aggressive treatment to deal with that.”
Liu said the more the surgeon can remove, the better the patient is going to do.
Preliminary studies have shown that the open-top light-sheet, or OTLS, microscopy technologies developed by Liu’s lab can allow for rapid microscopic imaging of fresh tissue surfaces to guide tumor-resection procedures.
“The cutting-edge work happening at UW will help doctors get a full, accurate picture of the tumors they are working to treat, so they can make sure patients get the most effective care possible,” U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a news release last week.
The other awardees in this round of funding for the Cancer Moonshot Initiative are Tulane University, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, the University of California in San Francisco, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Cision Vision in California.
Liu says they will also partner with startup companies, like the one he founded five years ago in Seattle called Alpenglow Biosciences.
“Once we prototype the device in our lab, they can help to build the clinical system that they will install at various sites both at the University of Washington and at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,” said Liu.
“This all takes significant funding to pull it off and compile the data to prove it’s working. It’s not cheap and this funding allows us to move quickly and do big studies,” he said.
Liu said they will be required to provide frequent updates to the federal government.
“Most of our grants in the past have come from NIH and they’re pretty hands off but in this case it’s a contract from ARPA-H and they are a lot more heavily and closely managed,” said Liu. “They expect to have monthly meetings with us with specific milestones that we have to hit to keep the funding coming. It’s up to $21 million but we have to meet our milestones to get the full five-year amount.”
Is a 50% reduction in cancer deaths possible by 2047?
“Surgery is only one part of that and we’re going to do our best,” said Liu. “But there are other ways to attack this from different angles, whether it’s better drug treatments or better early detection, so with all that, it’s a possibility we can reach that goal.”
