Battling Cancer with Engineering: NCI Funds New $13 Million Microenvironment and Metastasis Research Center

Adding potent research firepower and fresh physical perspectives to combat cancer, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has funded the new Center on the Microenvironment and Metastasis, which will be headquartered at Cornell University. It is one of 12 new research centers across the nation recently announced by the NCI. This grant is for $13 million over five years.

Cornell will serve as the lead institution in a partnership with the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and the University at Buffalo. The center will focus on using nanobiotechnology and other related physical science approaches to advance the research on cancer.

Harold Craighead, Cornell Professor of Engineering and the Director of Cornell's Nanobiotechnology Center, will serve as the Principal Investigator and Director of the new center. Barbara L. Hempstead, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Co-Chief of the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Weill Cornell Medical College, will serve as the Senior Co-Investigator.

"Our center will be organized to unravel cancer's complexity — using methods derived from the physical sciences and engineering — to further understand how cancer travels through the human body," says Dr. Craighead. "The research may help identify new drug possibilities to inhibit metastasis and tumor growth."

"By partnering engineers with physicians, this grant is, in essence, inviting a whole new discipline of scientists to the cancer table," says Dr. Hempstead. "Through this innovative collaboration we hope to gain new insights into how cancer cells migrate and form malignant metastases."

Nationally, the 12 new centers will bring a new cadre of theoretical physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers to the study of cancer. The Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers will take new, nontraditional approaches to cancer research by studying the physical laws and principles of cancer; evolution and evolutionary theory of cancer; information coding, decoding, transfer, and translation in cancer; and ways to deconvolute cancer's complexity.

"By bringing a fresh set of eyes to the study of cancer, these new centers have great potential to advance, and sometimes challenge, accepted theories about cancer and its supportive microenvironment," says John E. Niederhuber, MD, Director of the NCI. "Physical scientists think in terms of time, space, pressure, heat, and evolution in ways that we hope will lead to new understandings of the multitude of forces that govern cancer, and with that understanding, we hope to develop new and innovative methods of arresting tumor growth and metastasis."

Cornell's center will focus on three key projects:

  • Examining physiochemical transducers and their role in tumor angiogenesis, led by Claudia Fischbach-Teschl, Cornell Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Dr. Vivek Mittal, Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Weill Cornell;
  • Physical and chemical cues in tumor cell migration, led by Cynthia Reinhart-King, Cornell Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Dr. Paraskevi Giannakakou, Associate Professor of Pharmacology in Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Weill Cornell; and
  • Adhesion of tumor cells in the vascular microenvironment, led by Michael King, Cornell Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Dr. David Nanus, Professor of Medicine and Urology and Co-Chief of the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Weill Cornell.

A significant portion of the CMM research at the Weill Cornell campus will be conducted in laboratory space within the newly renovated Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Institute of Hematology and Medical Oncology. In addition, the Belfer Foundation's investment in several key faculty members was instrumental in allowing this project to coalesce and move forward. "The Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Foundation is committed to advancing cutting-edge cancer research and is therefore very pleased to play a part in this vibrant research enterprise. Technological innovation and research partnerships working to uncover disease mechanisms will help reach the ultimate goal of unlocking effective new treatments," says Robert A. Belfer, President of the Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Foundation.

Gail M. Seigel, PhD, Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo's Center for Hearing and Deafness, also serves on the Center's team.

Each of the 12 awarded Physical Sciences–Oncology Centers has convened groups of experts that individually and collectively will support and nurture a trans-disciplinary environment and promote research that originates and tests novel, non-traditional, physical-sciences-based approaches to understand and control cancer; generate independent sets of physical measurements and integrate them with existing knowledge of cancer; and develop and evaluate approaches from the physical sciences to provide a comprehensive and dynamic picture of cancer.

Ultimately, through coordinated development and testing of novel approaches to studying cancer processes, the network of centers is expected to generate new bodies of knowledge, in order to identify and define critical aspects of physics, chemistry and engineering that operate at all levels in cancer processes.

The National Cancer Institute is part of the National Institutes of Health. For information about the Physical Sciences–Oncology Centers program, go to http://physics.cancer.gov.


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