Rice-led cancer team gets $45M grant
A team of researchers led by Rice University will receive $45 million to create an implantable device that aims to reduce U.S. cancer-related deaths by more than 50 percent.
The device would initially be used for patients who did not respond to chemotherapy and radiation, treatments that attack the cancer directly but often damage healthy tissue. It would instead equip a patient’s immune system to fight the disease.
This type of treatment, called immunotherapy, is increasingly popular for fighting cancer. But it usually requires tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and monitors. The goal of Rice’s project would be to use engineered cells to produce biologic-based drugs inside patients. The dosage could then be adjusted in real time as cancer cells evolve and adapt.
“This is certainly a significant investment,” Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh, who is leading the team of researchers, said in an email Tuesday. “The amount reflects the urgent need for such an approach in the clinic. It is sufficient for us to launch a hyper-focused, Manhattan Project-type effort to build and test this urgently needed therapy.”
The researchers plan to take the device from concept through a completed human trial within five years. The first trial will focus on recurring ovarian cancer, but the technology could later be used to fight cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs.
In theory, Veiseh said, 50% of patients with solid tumors should respond to immunotherapy. But current therapies aren’t properly activating the immune system. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, only 15% to 20% of
patients achieve durable results with immunotherapy.
“Each person’s immune system responds differently to the immunotherapy. So dosing and type of immunotherapy in cancer management are difficult to pinpoint for each patient,” Veiseh said. “Some see too much toxicity and others see ineffective therapy.”
The implant’s sensors could solve this by determining the proper dosage and type of drug needed by each individual. The device would track how well the therapy is killing the cancer and then make adjustments as needed.
It would be implanted in the abdominal cavity where tumors of the ovaries, pancreas and colorectal cancer metastasize.
“Today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease,” Dr. Amir Jazaeri, one of the team’s researchers and a professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said in a news release. “We believe (the project) could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”
The $45 million award, larger than most grants received by Rice University, should allow the team to rapidly develop this technology. It was a funding award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a research funding agency created last year to support biomedical and health breakthroughs.
Rice University is working on this device with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University, the University of Houston, Johns Hopkins University, the Chicago-based startup CellTrans and New York City-based Bruder Consulting and Venture Group.
The entire team will meet at Rice University on Friday to launch their effort. They are also looking to hire additional scientists and engineers across the country.
“We are hitting the ground running across the 19 labs throughout the country,” Veiseh said. “Everyone is hyper-focused on this mission.”