10 Ways BU Researchers Could Revolutionize Cancer Care
Using Light to Track Cancer Treatment Progress
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Using Light to Track Cancer Treatment Progress
Imagine if tracking cancer treatment progress only required a simple beam of light . Boston University biomedical engineer Darren Roblyer has been harnessing optical technology—measuring the absorption and scattering of light waves—to create a tool for monitoring how well breast cancer tumors respond to chemotherapy or radiation treatment. Mammography, ultrasound, and MRI are not particularly good at analyzing whether a tumor is reacting to a certain therapy, says Roblyer. His device, currently in testing, can be used to assess if a tumor is likely to shrink.
“The problem is that some breast cancer patients respond to treatment and others don’t, but it can take months for this to become clear to the treating physician,” says Roblyer, a BU College of Engineering professor and graduate chair of biomedical engineering. “Our optical technique can measure the tumor during treatment at regular intervals to identify whether a patient is responding much earlier during treatment. In the future, this would allow the physician to change the treatment plan for the so-called ‘nonresponders’ so they don’t endure months of ineffective therapies.”
Engineered Immune Cells That Attack Cancer—and Reduce Side Effects
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Engineered Immune Cells That Attack Cancer—and Reduce Side Effects
When it comes to boosting immune cells’ disease fighting powers, the possibilities are endless, according to Wilson Wong . “Immune cells are very versatile and programmable,” says the ENG professor of biomedical engineering. In his BU lab, Wong and his team study ways to improve some of the most advanced immune cell–based cancer treatments invented in the last 10 years: CAR T-cell therapy, which is used to take on certain types of lymphoma and leukemia.
“CAR T-cell therapies have proven to be very powerful against some blood cancers,” Wong says. “In some cases, they provide durable remission—possibly even a cure—for some patients when all other medications have failed.”
But they come with risks, including potentially debilitating neurotoxicity. Wong has developed an alternative to help mitigate some potential side effects. His team’s VIPER CAR T-cells can be turned on or off—making it possible to stop cells from activating before severe side effects occur. The cost of these therapies are very high, so Wong is working on making treatments more accessible by using RNA as an avenue for delivering therapies.
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More Precise Surgical Techniques
As a surgeon focused on treating the pancreas, liver, gallbladder, and bile ducts—collectively called hepato-pancreato-biliary (HPB) surgery—Eduardo Vega meets patients in the clinic every week “who often arrive with late diagnoses, complicated lives, and enormous courage,” he says. “I’m driven to build tools that let us operate safer, decide wiser, and offer real hope to patients who have been told there isn’t much.” Vega is a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine assistant professor of surgery and HPB surgeon at Boston Medical Center – Brighton.
HPB surgeries have become more precise and minimally invasive in recent years. But Vega believes more practical steps can be taken to make even greater improvements—and ensure more patients can benefit. He hopes his team’s research can make complex HPB operations safer, for example, by integrating predictive models with personalized combinations of surgery and drug-based therapies.
“Progress comes from pairing technical innovation with compassion and equity. If we can shorten the distance between discovery and the bedside—especially for patients historically left behind—we can move survival curves and restore years of life that statistics once wrote off.”
Soft Robots That Make Cancer Surgery Safer
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Soft Robots That Make Cancer Surgery Safer
Surgeries are almost always associated with sharp, rigid tools—but Sheila Russo is reimagining that. She has demonstrated that a concept called soft robotics could provide better, safer surgical technology for highly complicated procedures to remove cancer tumors. Soft robots are made from materials like silicone rather than metals, allowing them to twist and stretch to fit their environment.
“My motivation comes from the recognition that cancer care often requires procedures that are not only highly complex, but also very demanding on both patients and clinicians,” says Russo, an ENG associate professor of mechanical engineering. “Traditional surgical tools, while effective, are often limited in their ability to navigate delicate anatomy with the gentleness that patients deserve.”
She says soft robotics is a fundamentally different approach, since these systems conform to the body’s natural structures, adapt their shape, and interact more safely with tissues. The idea that it’s possible to “design instruments that are both technically sophisticated and inherently patient-friendly is deeply motivating,” she says.
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New Therapies to Treat Oral Cancer
Although head and neck cancer (HNC) ranks as the seventh most common cancer worldwide, treatment options have not significantly improved over the past few decades, says Maria Kukuruzinska . An associate dean for research at BU’s Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine, she’s on a mission to change that. By better understanding the biology of HNC, Kukuruzinska hopes her studies will “lead to clinical trials that will enable us to control and cure HNC.”
“Despite its poor prognosis and high recurrence rates, oral squamous cell carcinoma, a type of cancer that originates in the mouth, remains greatly understudied worldwide,” she says. Her team’s work has identified a molecular pathway of how oral cancer cells acquire new identities, paving the way for therapies that target the mechanisms that lead to aggressive carcinomas. She also works with nutritional cancer experts to create dietary formulas with little to no serine—an amino acid that can amplify tumor growth in certain types of HNC—to be used for treating patients diagnosed with early stage oral cancer.
Cancer Treatments That Work for All Patients, Not Just Some
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Cancer Treatments That Work for All Patients, Not Just Some
Gerald V. Denis , a molecular oncologist, works to understand why certain cancer treatments work well for some patients, but not for others. Specifically, he has studied why people with type 2 diabetes have a harder time beating breast cancer than nondiabetic patients. His work has revealed that diabetes changes the way the immune system works inside tumors—an important discovery. As treatments improve, tackling these inequities is just as important as cancer prevention and detection strategies, he says, and can help stop the disease in its tracks.
“High-tech innovations drive discovery, expand the economy, and save lives, yet I keep coming back to early detection as a powerful tool to reduce suffering and death,” says Denis, the Shipley Prostate Cancer Research Professor at BU’s medical school and codirector of the BU-BMC Cancer Center. “Mortality from breast cancer used to be almost 100 percent, because women were too ashamed to acknowledge that they had a growing lump in their breast, and self-examination was not widely accepted. Advanced technologies and cutting-edge research are extremely important, but so are health equity and access, public education, and increased trust in cancer screening and delivery to save lives.”
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AI-Guided Cancer Treatment
A new BU project bringing together researchers with expertise in medicine, computational biology, and computer science will test the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the best course of lung cancer treatment. For many patients with the most common form of the disease, early-stage lung adenocarcinoma, the benchmark treatment is surgical resection—cutting out the problem tissue. It’s highly effective, says Jennifer Beane , a BU medical school associate professor of medicine, but “undertreatment of aggressive tumors remains a concern.” She and her fellow medical school researcher, Vijaya B. Kolachalama , will build, train, and refine an AI model that will use biopsy, clinical imaging, and molecular data to predict which tumors might grow back. The work is being funded by BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering .
“If we can accurately predict whether a lung tumor will recur prior to its surgical resection,” says Beane, a computational biologist and lung cancer researcher, “the surgeon and patient may jointly decide to treat the tumor more aggressively or perform a more extensive resection. The project is exciting because it has the potential to improve survival of patients with lung cancer.”
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Diets That Reduce Cancer Risk
What we eat might increase—or reduce—our risk of gastrointestinal cancers. Jessica Petrick is analyzing how diet and cancer are connected, with the goal of helping clinicians spot those most at risk—and build personalized diets to reduce their chances of getting cancer. “I study how the foods people eat change tiny molecules, called metabolites, circulating in their bodies,” says Petrick, a BU medical school assistant professor of medicine. “Some of these metabolites can signal early cancer risk.”
An investigator with the BU Black Women’s Health Study and member of the University’s Slone Epidemiology Center , she looks for patterns by sifting data on metabolites, cancer, and key aspects of diet, like fiber, fats, and ultra-processed foods. “I’m able to study these relationships in a large population that has historically been underrepresented in research,” says Petrick. The next step is to validate the metabolic markers she’s discovered in even larger patient groups, then develop clinical and dietary recommendations that, hopefully, stop cancer before it starts.
Connecting Communities and Researchers for More User-Friendly Cancer Care
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Connecting Communities and Researchers for More User-Friendly Cancer Care
For much of her career, Catharine Wang has been focused on increasing the accessibility of genetics and genomics tools, particularly for underrepresented and vulnerable populations. Genetic and genomic testing are powerful weapons in cancer prevention and treatment, helping patients understand their inherited cancer risk or clinicians better direct therapies. But they’re complex and expensive, meaning many patients miss out on their benefits.
Wang has studied ways to lower those barriers, leading programs to improve genetic health literacy and expand patient access. Now, she’s exploring ways of bringing end users—patients, clinicians—into the research process from the start, not after an innovation has been sent out into the world. She hopes that by incorporating user needs at the beginning of a study, researchers can design tests and therapies to be more accessible to those most likely to benefit from them.
“A lot of times, we talk about the value of getting community input when we conduct research, but scientists often don’t engage early enough in the research process,” says Wang, a BU School of Public Health professor of community health sciences and Peter T. Paul Career Development Professor. “When I talk to people who are building these great devices, I ask, ‘Do you know how to get it used by your patient population or adopted in the clinical setting?’ If the patients don’t understand it, they won’t use it or won’t use it right.”
By connecting communities and researchers in the early stages of conceptualization and design, Wang hopes innovators will learn about the lived experiences and issues that matter to real users—especially those from historically underrepresented populations. “How can we do things in a different way,” she says, “to make sure everybody is on an equal playing field and can benefit from these advances?”
The Liquid Biopsy: A Blood Test That Spots Cancer
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The Liquid Biopsy: A Blood Test That Spots Cancer
Biopsies are critical to diagnosing and treating cancer, giving clinicians insights into the disease’s type and progression in a way that imaging, like a CT scan, might not. But they’re also invasive, sometimes even requiring surgery. Erica Pratt is working on a faster, less painful alternative: a liquid biopsy—a blood test that could help pinpoint cancers .
In her BU lab, the ENG assistant professor of biomedical engineering is studying protein kinases, enzymes with the potential to be a cancer biomarker. Her team is developing a probe to spot and track tumor cell kinase activity in the blood, with the hope they will then be able to track the cancer too. The project is converging students and researchers from a range of fields, including biomedical engineering, chemical biology, and cell and molecular biology. By studying how tumor cells rewire key networks in the body, they hope to better understand how they “fuel metastasis and resistance to therapy,” says Pratt. “Using minimally invasive ‘liquid biopsies,’ we can monitor these changes in real-time to identify novel and potentially druggable targets. By building the right tools and using liquid biopsy as a road map, we can make real-time personalized treatment decisions instead of one-size-fits-all care.”
To check out other ways BU researchers and research are transforming lives and having an impact on the world, visit You Are Why .
