Virginia Tech plans to launch a cancer research initiative to promote collaboration among engineers, veterinarians, biomedical researchers and other scientists.
“We are going to create a sense of intellectual community of common interest for people. That takes money, resources and creating things they are interested in,” said Michael Friedlander, Tech’s vice president of health sciences and technology. “We are going to make available instrumentation and facilities for cancer researchers to use from all over the campus, some of which will be here, some of which will be new things we haven’t gotten yet. And we’re going to survey people: What do you need that you don’t have at Virginia Tech for leading-edge research?”
Friedlander said the initiative will create a way for researchers across Tech’s campuses, colleges and institutes to let others know about their cancer projects. The initiative will provide small grants to promote collaborations that could lead to joint projects that go after larger grants from foundations and agencies.
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The initiative will be centered on building collaborations within the university while also building on relationships with Carilion Clinic and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., to advance patient care.
“It’s a great thing, and brings together different ways of thinking,” said Nick Dervisis, an oncologist at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinarian Medicine, who said he’s already benefited from working with engineers.
As a clinician scientist, Dervisis said if he runs into a problem and needs a device or a drug that isn’t commercially available, he would tend to think it’s unattainable. But engineers think about how to make things and can find solutions, he said.
Additional collaborations will be welcome as the vet school expands its comparative oncology lab and moves it to Roanoke next year, he said, and as clinical trials on cancer in dogs are readied for trials in humans.
“People are realizing the limitation of working in your micro environment, your bubble,” he said.
Friedlander said the cancer research initiative is not intended to bring all of the research teams under one roof. Rather, it’s to bring the teams together to share their work and their ideas.
Jennifer Munson, an assistant professor in the biomedical engineering and mechanics department, said she’s excited to tell others about her work, which examines how fluid draining from tumors affects surrounding tissue. She came to Tech two years ago from the University of Virginia because of the strength of mechanical and electrical engineers already developing tools to look at cancers.
She said that she learns of others’ work now through reading Tech’s daily email newsletter, giving lectures and going to others’ talks, and by hearing from students about what other professors are doing. She collaborates with outside universities and cancer centers, and she has developed partnerships on campus, but she welcomes a more cohesive framework.
Unlike at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, where scientists in different disciplines are encouraged to collaborate, a formal process across Tech is lacking, Friedlander said.
“Once you go across the whole university, you have colleges and they have departments, and like any large organization there is a tendency to kind of stay at home,” he said. “I think Virginia Tech is one of the better collaborative universities, but nonetheless there are challenges. So what we are trying to do is take the ethos of this institute and, in the cancer space, spread it to the whole university and create that ease of conversation.”
He didn’t rule out a centralized cancer research center in the future. For now, there is not a plan to do that or to move people from one college to another.
The initiative came about when Friedlander sought to find out how many people were working on cancer research.
So he dived into databases of project funding and sent dozens of emails to cancer researchers asking for help in finding others working in the field.
“Much to my delight I found there are 23 programs funded by the National Cancer Institute on cancer research at Virginia Tech. If you asked me before I got into that data, I would have guessed maybe five to eight,” he said.
The grants and subcontracts are valued at between $4.5 million and $5 million a year, he said.
He identified 30 cancer research teams in Roanoke and Blacksburg and figures he has missed some.
Friedlander said all the researchers will be invited to a meeting to talk about their projects and to get to know each other. A leadership council will be formed to look at ways to communicate and seed projects.
Harald Sontheimer, executive director of the School of Neuroscience and director of the Center for Glial Biology in Health, Disease and Cancer, already splits his time between Roanoke and Blacksburg and is working on brain cancer research across departments.
He said it’s difficult for junior researchers to learn what others are doing.
Sontheimer was at Yale and the University of Alabama Birmingham in more traditional cancer research centers associated with medical centers.
“At Tech, it’s really spread all over the campus,” he said. “People are used to centers where they put everyone in a big place to work together on genetics or cells.”
He said having one of the few vet schools in the country offers a great opportunity, since pets share some of the same types of cancers and live in the same environment as humans.
Also, relationships with engineers open up new tools and solutions.
“We’re using 3D printers, and we’re actually printing cancer on a dish,” he said. “We have a richness here with bioengineering that doesn’t exist elsewhere.”
But not having a designated cancer program has made it difficult for philanthropy, as donors prefer to give money to centers rather than individual researchers, he said.
Friedlander expects the initiative to build a brand that becomes attractive to foundations and the National Cancer Institute.