Illinois Medicine

'' B We hope that by making research easier, we will free up people to think more creatively. '' Y COMPARING HIGHLY SOPHISTICATED magnetic resonance images and the results of surgical biopsies, medical physicist Xiaohong Joe Zhou, PhD, hopes to track the spread of can- THE PATH TO FIGHT CANCER cer cells in the brain. Zhou, a professor of radiology, neurosurgery and bioengineering, received one of the initial CCTS pilot grants for a study he leads that's testing a method of tracking the spread of malignant glioma, a brain tumor that is diagnosed in 10,000 new cases in the U.S. each year and has a two-year survival rate of 25 percent. The cancer is so deadly in part because it's difficult for doctors to determine which parts of the brain it has infiltrated. Zhou's team is examining the brain's white matter fiber tracts, which provide the network for the brain to transmit and receive neurological signals. Using a form of MRI called diffusion tensor imaging, the researchers will examine brain cancer patients before they undergo surgery to remove their tumors, then compare the possible migration of tumor cells with the pathology results of the biopsy taken during surgery. Reflecting the CCTS emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration, Zhou's research team includes Herbert Engelhard, MD, PhD, chief of neuro-oncology and associate professor of neurosurgery; John Villano, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine in the section of hematology/ oncology; and Tibor Valyi-Nagy, MD, PhD, director of neuropathology and associate professor of pathology. Keith Thulborn, MD, PhD, professor of radiology and director of the Center for MR Research at UIC, also is a consultant on the project. The $90,000 CCTS grant will fund a postdoc- toral fellow with a PhD in medical imaging who will work on the study full time over the next two years. It also will fund the purchase of computer equipment and materials for the pathology analysis. "The support is critical," Zhou says. "We have been planning on do- ing this study for a long time. Now we can go ahead with it and generate preliminary results that we can use to pursue NIH funding." 22 | SPRING 2 010 O and bring people together to create communities of researchers around a human health problem," Mazzone says. "The aim is to foster unique, high-impact research that relates directly to important issues in human health." NE OF THE CCTS' PRIMARY TOOLS is pro- viding financial support for new translational research investigations. The center funds a program of pilot grants for promising research projects that need seed money to get off the ground and potentially develop to the point that they can qualify for external funding. In its first two years, the center awarded 14 grants totaling $1.1 million, and the expectation is that the center will use NIH funding to award another half-dozen similarly sized grants each year. Getting more researchers to work together across disciplines is a big part of the goal. Mazzone notes that research scientists are divided by boundaries of methodological approach (e.g., basic science, patient or community-based research), area of study (car- diology, oncology, neurology, etc.) and academic area (between colleges and the departments within each one). Robin Mermelstein, PhD, director of the pilot grant program, adds that such collaborations are important to speeding the progress from scientific discovery to clinical implementation, which the NIH has estimated can take up to 15 years. "For most scientists, the endpoint of their work is to publish in peer-reviewed journals in their own disci- pline. If you develop collaborative teams that include people who take the science and think immediately about what the clinical application is, we will speed up that process," explains Mermelstein, a professor of psychology and director of the Institute for Health Research and Policy in the UIC School of Public Health. To stimulate such collaborations, the pilot grants are awarded to studies that are multidisciplinary in their methodology. "Often it's risky to go outside your department, so we're providing an incentive for people to take that risk," Mermelstein says. The center's financial support for research also includes a scholars program, which funds between 50 and 75 percent of selected junior faculty members' salaries for a two-year period, freeing up an equal percentage of their work time to devote to research. Typically, the CCTS scholars program protects a faculty member's time while he or she gathers sufficient data to seek external funding. So far, the program has supported five faculty members, four of whom have gone on to obtain external funding for their studies. "It's tremendously liberating," says Mazzone, whose own re- search is centered on obesity and diabetes, which is a research and clini- cal focus at Illinois Medicine, in part due to a prioritization suggested years ago by Tom Layden, MD, Edmund F. Foley Professor and chair of the department of medicine and former head of hepatology. "Research is something you can't stop and start. You have to concentrate on it for a sustained period of time if you're going to get maximum benefit." PHOTO: STEVE BECKER

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