Wednesday, April 27, 2011

MGH, UMass Medical researchers awarded $1M matching grants

By Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Massachusetts Medical Center were granted $1 million cooperative research grants today by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, the quasi-public agency running the state’s 10-year, $1 billion life sciences initiative.

In this second round of cooperative research grants, each recipient will receive $250,000 per year for two years from the center, to be matched 100 percent by their industry partner, to total $1 million for each grant.

Qianqian Fang, radiology instructor at MGH, Harvard Medical School, will collaborate with Philips Healthcare, an Andover medical equipment supplier, to develop a combined optical and mammography device that would be retrofitted to the more than 9,000 installed x-ray mammography systems in the United States. The researchers hope to fuse functional tissue information from optical images with traditional x-ray mammography images to improve breast diagnosis and lower health care costs by reducing false positives.

Over the past decade, Fang and his collaborators have been working on combining safe, non-invasive diffuse optical imaging technology with structural digital breast tomosynthesis. They have demonstrated the clinical potential of using such multi-modality imaging to reduce follow-ups and biopsies and improve cancer diagnosis accuracy.

Fang said he and his colleagues have early clinical studies that show that optical and x-ray image data together can distinguish between malignant and benign breast lesions. “The optical images can probe hemoglobin concentrations in deep tissue,” he said. “There is a significant difference in the total hemoglobin concentration, with malignant tumors having more hemoglobin. And cysts have low hemoglobin and low oxygen saturation.” They published their results in Radiology in January. “This technique is very promising over a traditional mammogram, which gets more than 80 percent of the tumors but has high false positives,” he added.

“The combination of mammography with functional imaging using optical technology could potentially lead to earlier breast cancer diagnosis, thereby increasing the therapeutic options for women,” said Pamela Bankert, general manager of the Women’s Healthcare and Diagnostics X-ray Business at Philips Healthcare. 

Fang will work with Philips on a new machine that can be attached to existing Philips X-ray systems to add an optical imaging function to them. Philips will work on an elastic registration model that will use mathematics to basically stretch data from X-rays, which move in a straight line, over the contours of a breast outline and conform them to the optical data, thus putting the two data sets together to give physicians more information.

He added that having an industrial partner provides access to industrial design techniques for the machine, market penetration and experience with government approvals of equipment.

The second winner is Robert Brown, MD and chair of UMass Medical School’s Dept. of Neurology in Worcester, who will collaborate with RXi Pharmaceuticals Corp., an RNAi therapeutics discovery company in Worcester. Brown is working on a new treatment for ALS using self-delivering rxRNA, which does not require a delivery vehicle to enter cells and is claimed to have improved pharmacology compared to traditional RNA treatments. This is the second cooperative research matching grant awarded to UMass Medical School in collaboration with RXi.

“We recommended these two grants as holding great potential for both scientific advancement and commercialization,” Harvey Lodish, chair of the Life Sciences Center’s advisory board and member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, said about Fang and Brown in a statement.

The first round of grants was awarded by the center in December 2008 and gave out $3.7 million to six projects.