The funding is part of $150M awarded by ARPA-H in support of the Cancer Moonshot initiative to fast-track discovery in cancer research and save millions of lives
A Johns Hopkins University-led research team has received $20.9 million over five years to advance surgical capabilities to treat cancer, part of $150 million in funding announced last week by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) in support of the Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot initiative.
The team is led by Emad Boctor, director of the Medical UltraSound Imaging and Intervention Collaboration Research Laboratory in the university’s Whiting School of Engineering. It is one of eight groups across the country to receive support in this round of funding from the ARPA-H Precision Surgical Interventions program.
The award will support the development of a novel non-contact, photoacoustic endoscope and a multi-cancer fluorescent contrast agent. Together they will provide an enhanced view of the surgical field and make it easier for surgeons to remove tumors.
Surgical procedures are often the first treatment option for the two million Americans diagnosed with cancer each year. However, more than 10% of cancer surgeries leave cancer cells behind. Current surgical technologies do not allow doctors to easily and fully distinguish cancer cells from normal surrounding tissue in the operating room, resulting in unintentional patient injury and repeat operations due to incomplete tumor removal.
“It’s not about one surgery versus two—it’s a matter of survival rate, human life,” Boctor says. “Enabling a successful first surgery and ending it with a negative margin—when there are no cancer cells left behind—means that you are not only giving more years to the patient but sustaining their quality of life, as well.”
Added Theodore DeWeese, dean of the medical faculty and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine: “At Johns Hopkins, our shared belief in the power of research to improve lives and bring hope to millions of people informs everything we do every single day. This award provides significant resources to advance the technology that will ensure greater precision and success during highly complex cancer surgeries.”
The Cancer Moonshot initiative, launched in 2016 and reignited under the Biden administration, aims to accelerate scientific discovery in cancer research and reduce the cancer death rate in the United States by at least half by 2047, preventing more than 4 million cancer deaths and improving the experience of people who are touched by cancer. ARPA-H was established in 2022 as part of the effort, to generate breakthroughs in the prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer and other diseases; in its first two years, it has invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress in the fight against cancer.
President Joe Biden has long championed the Cancer Moonshot initiative, dating to his days as vice president. In March 2016, he visited JHU’s East Baltimore campus and addressed researchers, medical students, government leaders, and others during the dedication of the then-new Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins. The institute, founded in large part with gifts of $50 million each from Michael R. Bloomberg and Sidney Kimmel, has been a leader in the development of treatments that turn the immune system’s natural disease-fighting powers against cancer.
“This institute is going to perfect new therapies and bring hope to millions of people,” Biden said during the dedication event. “I’m convinced, not only will we save millions of lives, we will re-instill in the American public the notion that anything is possible.”
This latest award from ARPA-H will support a team of researchers from JHU’s schools of Engineering and Medicine, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, and industry. Other Hopkins researchers involved in this effort include Jin U. Kang, Peter Kazanzides, Mathias Unberath, and Russell H. Taylor from the Whiting School and Jeeun Kang, Raymond C. Koehler, Jacky Jennings, Lisa Jacobs, and Ashley Cimino-Mathews from the School of Medicine.
Two other Hopkins researchers also received new ARPA-H funding to support projects exploring medical imaging techniques to improve cancer treatments—School of Medicine surgeon Jeff Jopling and Nicholas Durr, an associate professor in the university’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Jopling will partner with researchers from Cision Vision, a Silicon Valley-based biotech company, to develop novel imaging approaches without dyes that can help surgeons visualize critical, often hidden structures such as blood vessels and nerves to minimize risk of injury and optimize patient outcomes.
Durr will partner with Dartmouth to improve robotic cancer surgeries by visualizing critical structures that are often unintentionally injured. His laboratory will develop a novel laparoscope that can image fluorescence signals in three dimensions. His co-investigator, Ahmed Ghazi at the School of Medicine, will create anatomically realistic phantoms needed for testing that system.
