Engineering takes on cancer

The World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 5 people will develop cancer in their lifetimes, and cancer is one of the most difficult diseases to treat. It claims the lives of 1 in 9 men and 1 in 12 women. 

Cancer develops when mutant cells elude the body’s immune system and then multiply at an abnormal rate. Treatment requires a sound understanding of the biological principles at work – in both the cancerous cells themselves and their interaction with the body – as well as clinical methods that incorporate this knowledge. 

Illinois Grainger Engineering is leveraging engineering principles to accelerate advancements in cancer biology and treatment. Its capabilities were underlined in 2024 when the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) – a federal agency founded in 2022 to fund research that will deliver working, accessible solutions to health problems – awarded two grants totaling $54 million to teams led by Grainger Engineering faculty members.

“We were one of very few institutions to receive two separate ARPA-H awards. This speaks to the power of the engineering-driven science that we do.”

Rohit Bhargava, Professor, Bioengineering

Surgery done right the first time with Stephen Boppart

Boppart’s ARPA-H project, Margin Diagnostics (MarginDx), is developing a comprehensive high-resolution imaging system for detecting tumorous tissue during surgery. Combining advanced optical imaging technology with AI, it will discern whether tissue is tumorous in real time, helping surgeons remove as much of a tumor as possible. The goal is to significantly reduce the need for additional operations.

“The reoperation rate for breast cancer surgery can be as high as 20% to 30%,” Boppart said. “Surgeons only know if the entire tumor was removed when the tissue is later analyzed by a pathologist. With MarginDx, the surgeon will be able to point a handheld scanner at the remaining tissue and immediately determine whether any tumor remains, a process that currently takes days. It makes it possible to do cancer surgery right the first time.”

Boppart notes that the team will be able to draw on years of previous research.

“Illinois is leading the technology development. But engineering a comprehensive solution requires looking at things like how this system will interface with people in the operating room, what the costs associated with these procedures are and how we can reduce them.”

Stephen Boppart,
Professor, Electrical
& Computer Engineering and Bioengineering

“For more than 15 years, my research group has collaborated with surgeons at Carle Health to develop and investigate uses for imaging technology in surgery,” he said. “This includes optical coherence tomography, revealing large-scale tumor structures without marks or dyes, and more recently nonlinear optics, in which small-scale structures respond to incident light by emitting distinctive light of their own. We integrated these components into a single device, where the response of one laser pulse gives all this information at once.”

The system will then use AI to identify signs of cancer.

A team of 70 people was brought together for MarginDx by the IHSI, which Boppart directs, and the Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance for Technology-Based Healthcare. The project includes researchers from Grainger Engineering and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and Florida, and the startup Eleuthra Photonics.

“Illinois is leading the technology development. But engineering a comprehensive solution requires looking at things like how this system will interface with people in the operating room, what the costs associated with these procedures are and how we can reduce them,” Boppart said.

Stephen Boppart is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering. He holds joint appointments in the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering and the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. He is the director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute at Illinois. He is a member of the Cancer Center at Illinois and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois. He is also affiliated with the Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at Illinois Grainger Engineering and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.

Reproducible tumor manufacturing with Bill King

King’s ARPA-H project, Manufacturing Agile and SCalable Organoid Tumor models (MASCOT), will develop a platform for manufacturing tumor cultures, or “models,” used to replicate instances of cancer outside the body.

There is so much variation between patients that standardized regimens will often be unsuccessful: it is necessary to develop individualized approaches to treatment. By growing laboratory tumor models that closely match a cancer that appears in a human patient, clinicians and researchers can study the efficacy of different treatment options and select the best one.

“The idea behind MASCOT is to reimagine tumor model growth as digital manufacturing,” King said. “The goal is to have consistent size, shape and chemical composition across tumors, and this is something that digital manufacturing can do very well. Instead of individual models hand-grown in a lab, you can reliably produce hundreds of identical models at once, and now you can systematically study things like the effects of different drugs on the same tumor.”

Leveraging advanced manufacturing technology, advanced sensing, and AI, the platform will consistently produce large quantities of uniform tumor models to study their interactions with drugs, nutrients and their environment.

Models are currently grown by hand in the laboratory, resulting in two problems. First, techniques for growing cell cultures are usually two-dimensional, while tumors are intrinsically three-dimensional. It has been shown that 3D models behave like cancers from human patients while 2D models do not. Second, hand-grown models exhibit wide variation that human intervention on its own cannot address, limiting their utility in systematic studies.

“We will use ideas from advanced manufacturing to monitor and control variability to make things consistently,” King said. “First, the models will be seeded robotically, by inserting cells into 3D containers in a controlled manner. The seeds are then incubated and monitored using imaging and chemical spectroscopy techniques. AI uses this information to decide whether to stage a chemical intervention for either encouraging or suppressing tumor growth.”

AI will play an especially significant role in this effort because it allows the researchers to design chemical interventions without needing to understand the fundamental biological responses of the tumors.

“We don’t know how to direct cancer growth. If we did, we would know everything about it and be able to cure it,” said Bhargava, also a MASCOT co-principal investigator. “But from a manufacturing perspective, we don’t need to. We only need to know what external signals to give it to get the desired results. That automatically reduces the complexity and lets us solve the problem at hand.”

Bill King is a professor of mechanical science and engineering in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering. He also holds appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering and in the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. He is a member of the Cancer Center at Illinois and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois, and he is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory and the  Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at Illinois Grainger Engineering. He holds the Ralph A. Anderson Endowed Chair.

The new ARPA-H projects are only two of many battles Grainger Engineering is fighting in the war on cancer. Additional projects, featured below, are pursuing everything from cancer vaccines to new tools for observing cancers.

Read more about how Illinois Grainger engineers are fighting cancer.