Doyley Receives NIH Award

Congratulations to Professor Marvin Doyley who has received a R01 award from the National Institutes Health. This $2,435,174 award administered by the National Institute of of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering will support the project titled "Surrogate biomarkers for assessing changes in pancreatic cancer tumor microenvironment."

Currently, surgical resection is the only curative therapy for patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. However, only 15-20% of pancreatic cancer patients have resectable disease at diagnosis. For patients with borderline resectable tumors, targeted neoadjuvant therapies can downstage the tumor and enable surgical resection; however, these therapies would be more effective if clinicians had real-time information regarding patient response. To better inform therapeutic decisions, this project will first establish shear modulus and vascular perfusion as valid imaging biomarkers for assessing patient response to neoadjuvant therapy. The ultimate goal is then to develop an endoscopic device that surgeons could use to look inside the body in order to determine whether a patient is responding to treatment and, if so, when they are ready to undergo tumor removal.

Collaborators on this project include Brian Pogue, recently appointed chair of the Department of Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and, at Rochester, David Linehan, professor and chair of surgery; Scott Gerber, associate professor of surgery and of microbiology and immunology; Aram Hezel, associate professor of hematology/oncology; Tanzy Love, associate professor of biostatistics; Jonathan Kallas, assistant professor of imaging sciences, and David Dombroski, associate professor of imaging sciences.

More information can be found here.