The four PIs on the project, from left to right: Brian Summa (Tulane), J. Quincy Brown (Tulane – Lead PI), Valerio Pascucci (University of Utah), and Peter Kner (UGA). (submitted photo)
Peter Kner is on a mission to revolutionize cancer treatment.
President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden announced Tuesday an almost $23 million award to create an imaging system giving doctors the ability to scan a tumor during surgery and determine within minutes whether any cancer tissue has been left behind.
Peter Kner, professor at the University of Georgia College of Engineering’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is collaborating on the project alongside researchers at Tulane University and the University of Utah.
Peter Kner
This research would forever change cancer treatment as we know it, allowing doctors to determine with certainty that all cancer tissue has been removed – while still in the operating room.
The project, MAGIC-SCAN (Machine-learning Assisted Gigantic Image Cancer margin SCANner), aims to create one of the world’s fastest high-resolution tissue scanners, capable of detecting residual cancer cells on the surface of removed organs within minutes. The system should be able to accurately highlight cancer at the cellular level, rendering a highly detailed 3D map of the surface of the tumor.
“Currently, it can take days to weeks before a surgeon knows whether all the tumor has been removed, and our goal is to get that down to 10 minutes, while the patient is still on the table,” said J. Quincy Brown, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the Tulane School of Science and Engineering and lead researcher on the project. “If successful, our work would transform cancer surgery as we know it.”
First Lady Jill Biden delivers remarks at Biden Cancer Moonshot event at Tulane University, where the project’s funding was announced (submitted photo)
Kner, an expert on super-resolution microscopy, and his team will be responsible for developing technology to remove background and to increase the resolution of the system to 0.5 microns, improving the system’s ability to detect cancer cells. He has been awarded a nearly $1.5 million sub-award for this research.
The award comes from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). MAGIC-SCAN is the one of the first eight teams selected by its Precision Surgical Interventions (PSI) program to develop novel technologies that will allow surgeons to remove cancerous tumors with higher accuracy.
“Our system will need to image at very high resolution over large fields of view to rapidly and accurately identify all the cancer cells in the tissue,” said Kner. “This will require exciting and novel approaches to enhance nanoscale imaging.”
By Lillian Ballance
