U. awarded $15.2 million to launch cancer center

The center will take an interdisciplinary approach to studying cancer, incorporating the work of physicists, chemists, oncologists, biochemists and engineers, according to the statement.

Chemistry professor Salvatore Torquato, who will be a member of the center’s team of researchers, said in an e-mail that the creation of the center is “a significant and novel development.”

“Cancer is a medical mystery, and progress in our ability to control and limit it has been slow,” he added. “NCI has deemed it important to bring a physics-based approach to understand this terrible disease.”

The Princeton center is one of 12 such centers in the NCI network, and it will involve collaboration with scientists at UC-San Francisco, Johns Hopkins Hospital, UC-Santa Cruz, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

“By bringing a fresh set of eyes to the study of cancer, these new centers have great potential to advance, and sometimes challenge, accepted theories about cancer and its supportive microenvironment,” NCI director John Niederhuber said in the statement.

“Physical scientists think in terms of time, space, pressure, heat and evolution in ways that we hope will lead to new understandings of the multitude of forces that govern cancer — and with that understanding, we hope to develop new and innovative methods of arresting tumor growth and metastasis.”

The Princeton center’s researchers will employ physics-based methods to test how cancerous cells respond to different environments and variables with the long-term goal of trying to understand how to prevent or inhibit the formation of tumors. The team will also implement advanced computer programs to model tumor growth.

“A tumor is a heterogeneous thing with many different metapopulations of cells inside it,” the center’s principal investigator, physics professor Robert Austin, said in the University statement. “We’re trying to represent the biological environment of a tumor and hopefully understand the rules by which a tumor evolves.”

Earlier work done by Austin and his colleagues will form the basis for the research done by some of the center’s scientists, who are already culturing prostate cancer cells in preparation for experiments.

“The mortality rates for many cancers are flat to rising,” Austin explained in the statement. “It’s true that people are living longer than they used to live, but in the end, the cancer wins most of the time. Our current ‘shock and awe’ approach to treatment may not be the best thing to do. We’re leaving behind small populations of highly resistant cells.”

The other centers in the NCI network will be based at Arizona State, Cornell, the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Northwestern, the Scripps Research Institute, UC-Berkeley, the University of Southern California and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.