UT institutions receive grant for cancer center

Five institutions, including three within the UT system, received nearly $2.5 million from the National Cancer Institute to establish a center to identify better ways to deliver treatment to cancerous tissue, the institute announced last week.

Researchers from the UT Health Science Center at Houston, UT-Austin, the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University and Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital will collaborate through the new Center for Transport Oncophysics to study cancer.

“We give people drugs for the cancer when it becomes metastatic,” said Mauro Ferrari, the center’s director and chairman of nanomedicine and biomedical engineering at the Health Science Center. “Essentially we are giving them tremendous poisons, as much as they can take without dying to get rid of the cancer. Anything we can do to get more drug to the cancer and less to the rest of the body [is] a step forward for everybody.”

Mauro Ferrari, the center’s director and chair of biomedical engineering at the Health Science Center, said the center aims to identify ways to mass transport cancer treatments directly to affected sites. He compared mass transport to using a key to open a door and said identifying the keyholes on cancer cells is necessary to make the right key.

“To open the door, even with the right key, you must be in contact with the door. You cannot be two or three rooms away,” Ferrari said. “But how do you get the key to travel with you to the door? That’s a problem of mass transport.”

The new center is part of the cancer institute’s physical sciences-oncology program, which kicked off Monday. The program allows researchers from different backgrounds, including biology, physics, engineering and chemistry, to study cancer from various perspectives.

“By having different perspectives, you can look at cancer in a different way,” said Larry Nagahara, the program’s director.

“We merge people with backgrounds in the physical sciences and oncology fields to work together to get a better understanding of how the disease works.”

Nagahara said that because cancer has many problems and barriers, 12 centers have been established across the country to address different fundamental aspects of cancer.

The cancer institute awarded the center $2.4 million for its first year. The institute is an agency of the National Institutes of Health and is the single largest sponsor of cancer research. Though the institute operates on one-year budget cycles, the center is expected to receive more than $11 million over a five-year period.

Nicholas Peppas, chairman of UT-Austin’s department of biomedical engineering, will lead a project to better understand how the transport of drugs takes place in cancerous tissue, which could improve the delivery of drugs to specific tumors in the body, he said.

“This award [from the cancer institute] recognizes that the people working on this are some of the best people in the world,” Peppas said. “This is very important for the state of Texas because the rewards [and] the outcomes of this particular center will lead to the development of better treatments for patients who suffer from cancer.”