New NCI PSOC U01 Funded

Excited to finally announce our new funding of the NCI U01 grant CA25048 entitled: “Image-based models of tumor-immune dynamics in glioblastoma”

Contact MPI: Kristin Swanson
MPI: Leland Hu, MD (Radiology, Mayo Clinic)
MPI: Peter Canoll, MD, PhD (Director of Neuropathology, Columbia Univ)

This $3.8M award will support our ability to resolve the dynamics of the human immune system within the glioblastoma microenvironment during the course of a patients’ care.

Abstract: Our inability to explain why some patients do not respond to immunotherapy, combined with our inability to
predict the responders, poses a serious challenge to advancing cancer care and research. Currently, biopsies
serve as the most informative way to assess the immunological activity within a cancerous area, but we are
spatially and temporally limited in the number of biopsies we can obtain from patients, especially in cases of
brain cancer. We propose here a novel strategy merging artificial intelligence and mechanistic modeling to
reveal the spatial and temporal tumor-immune landscape within patients by connecting a unique resource of
image-localized biopsies and clinical imaging for cohorts treated with standard and immunotherapies.