Three Faculty Members Awarded $165,000 toward Research at Lurie Cancer Center
At its fourth annual cocktail reception on September 30, the Associate Board of Lurie Cancer Center celebrated another year of fundraising success by awarding three Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine scientists who are pursuing high-risk, high-reward cancer research.
The board of young professionals awarded $165,000 to John Rogers, PhD, Mohamed Abazeed, MD, PhD, and Laila Gharzai, MD. Dr. Rogers won the $100,000 Innovative Research Award, and Dr. Abazeed and Dr. Gharzai jointly won a $65,000 Innovative Clinical Trial Award.
To date, the board has provided more than $500,000 in grants to Northwestern investigators who have leveraged their projects into $4.5 million in additional funding, said board co-chair Louise Arnott Cardillo, JD.
Leon Platanias, MD, PhD, director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and the Jesse, Sara, Andrew, Abigail, Benjamin, and Elizabeth Lurie Professor of Oncology, kicked off the event with a warm welcome and an optimistic outlook on the future of cancer care. He noted that, thanks to advances in engineering, chemistry, and data informatics, research can now move markedly faster.
Dr. Platanias also remembered Alex Pancoe, a dedicated member of the Associate Board and brain tumor survivor who tragically passed away in a mountaineering accident earlier this year. After he was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia in 2022, he established the Pancoe Translational Innovation Initiative in Leukemia. His widow, Nina Pancoe, attended the reception.
“Alex’s memory will always be with us and will be inspiring us in other efforts to fight leukemia and other cancers,” Dr. Platanias told attendees.
New Approaches to Cancer Treatment
Board co-chair Jamey Maniscalco, PhD, introduced the award recipients who are carrying forth the board’s mission to innovate in cancer research.
Dr. Rogers, the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Neurological Surgery, worked with Craig Horbinski, MD, PhD, to develop a bioresorbable implant that could one day deliver cancer-fighting drugs to the more than 8,000 patients with meningioma per year in the US.
Dr. Rogers and Dr. Horbinski developed a new type of medical wafer that can directly deliver chemotherapy directly to the tumor site, potentially reducing the need for repeated surgeries and radiation. The wafers, made from a material called polyanhydride, are safe, flexible, and can be stored at room temperature, Dr. Rogers explained. When placed inside the body, they slowly dissolve and release medicine directly where—and when—it's needed.
In early tests, the wafers were loaded with a cancer-fighting drug called docetaxel, and when used in mice, they successfully prevented the growth of malignant meningiomas without side effects. The award funding enables Dr. Rogers and Dr. Horbinski to test promising drug cocktails using the new wafer technology.
“This research would be impossible without your contributions and your generosity,” Dr. Rogers said in remarks at the reception. “And I think it's a great example of how engineers can work with medical doctors to address real challenges in patient care.”
Dr. Horbinski, a professor of Pathology and Neurological Surgery at Feinberg, recently accepted a new appointment at Mayo Clinic in Florida and will continue the project in collaboration with Dr. Rogers.
Dr. Abazeed and Dr. Gharzai lead the iSeg—“individualized segmentation”—clinical trial for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer. ISeg is a new AI tool that helps physicians more accurately identify which parts of a tumor need to be treated with radiation, a manual task subject to human error, Dr. Abazeed explained in his remarks. The tool reduces physicians’ guesswork and will help ensure patients get the best care possible, whether they are receiving cancer care from a rural clinic or at a major academic medical center like Northwestern Medicine.
“This could have taken years, if not a decade, but because of your generous support, we're going to be able to put this in the hands of physicians at Northwestern University within the next four months,” Dr. Abazeed said.
Since 2022, the Associate Board of Lurie Cancer Center has supported research from Northwestern faculty members Adam Lin, MD, PhD, Shira Dinner, MD, Kehinde U.A. Adekola, MD, MS, and Marcelo Bonini, PhD.
“We're so fortunate to be able to do this work,” Maniscalco said. “I think we get more out of it than anybody else: to be able to give back, to have some autonomy, to take action in the face of something that feels so uncontrollable and makes us feel so helpless, like cancer does.”
For more information about supporting the Associate Board of Lurie Cancer Center, please contact Nicole Langert at nicole.langert@northwestern.edu or 312-503-1656.