A chemical and biomolecular engineering professor has received a prestigious Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) Career Development Award to develop an innovative multi-modal imaging platform for melanoma diagnosis and treatment evaluation.
Assistant Professor Rizia Bardhan will use novel immunoactive gold nanostructures (IGNs) in conjunction with PET scanning and Raman spectroscopy to assess tumor immunomarkers – both to enable patient selection for immunotherapy and to spare other melanoma patients from toxic side effects and costly interventions that will be ineffective for them.
“For them” is a critical piece of the puzzle and another step toward personalized, patient-tailored cancer treatment. Melanoma is a highly aggressive form of skin cancer that rapidly metastasizes to distant organs, but 65-75 percent of patients don’t respond to a common immunotherapy regimen because existing methods fail to provide an accurate assessment of a biomarker (PD-L1) in such tumors.