The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been awarded a $33 million contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). This contract will fund a project and end-to-end platform solution that will significantly improve surgical outcomes for cancer tumor removal. The award is funded through ARPA-H’s Precision Surgical Interventions program, and the project, Margin Diagnostics (MarginDx), combines multi-modal label-free optical screening technologies with AI screening tools to ensure that tumor tissue and cells are completely removed during surgery. This project will bring together researchers and clinicians from Illinois and the Mayo Clinic, who’ll work alongside numerous other collaborates from the industry to find solutions.
CLIMB’s Professor Stephen Boppart is serving as the principal investigator of this project, and he’ll work closely with Dr. Janani Reisenauer, the overall clinical coordinator. She’s the Associate Chair for Innovation in the Department of Surgery, and the Division Chair of Thoracic Surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. The two of them will be joined by Dr. James W. Jakub, Surgical Oncologist and clinical site lead for the Mayo Clinic in Florida, as well as clinical teams at each campus. Together they’ll develop the MarginDx platform, with the goal of developing technology, techniques, and knowledge that will improve and streamline cancer surgeries and treatments all over the world, thus ensuring better patient experiences recoveries, and outcomes.
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