A team at Northwestern University has scored $45 million in federal funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) in a bid to develop an implantable device that could sense and potentially fight cancer. The innovative project known as "THOR: Targeted Hybrid Oncotherapeutic Regulation", is projected to span over a period of 5½ years.
Northwestern University is collaborating on this mission with Chicago-based startup, CellTrans, as well alongside Rice University, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Stanford University, University of Houston, Johns Hopkins University, and New York City's Bruder Consulting & Venture Group. The aim of the game? To develop an implant that could transform immunotherapy for patients battling cancers such as ovarian and pancreatic, as reported by Chicago Business.
At the helm of this project is Dr. Jonathan Rivnay, a professor of biomedical engineering, and materials science at Northwestern. According to Rivnay, the implant under development is around one centimeter in diameter. He believes that this treatment approach opens up prospects for personalized, multi-modal cancer therapy that could potentially revolutionize access to care, as reported by Chicago Business.
One of the main objectives of the THOR project to develop a device that can monitor inflammation markers indicating cancer and autonomously deliver immunotherapy when needed. This ground-breaking method is dubbed "closed-loop therapy," which forms a huge shift from the classic IV-based approach to a minimally invasive method allowing real-time dosage adjustments that can be remotely monitored. As per Rice University bioengineer Omid Veiseh, this is similar to how diabetes management has evolved and is a game-changer when it comes to cancer immunotherapy, as reported by CBS News.
The development of this implant is unsurprisingly not without its obstacles – the complex environments within the human body pose massive challenges in terms of continuous monitoring, particularly due to the harsh internal conditions that are not conducive to electronic devices. Rivnay and his team, alongside Shana Kelley, the Neena B. Schwartz Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern, are focusing their efforts to overcome to these hardships, with the ultimate goal of providing continuous, real-time insights into cancer progression and therapy, as reported by Chicago Business.
The timeframe for the THOR project includes four years dedicated to device development and animal testing, to closely follow is the human clinical trials phase. The initial focus will be on patients with recurring ovarian cancer. If it all goes as planned, the researchers at Northwestern University and their allies will have made a marked contribution to the fight against cancer.
