Today, as researchers advance new technologies designed to shift the action away from large specialized facilities toward smaller local clinics and to the patient’s home, test results related to cancer are needed within minutes rather than days.
It is a trend that promises to reduce costs, reduce the complexities and inconveniences of cancer care, make treatments available to more patients in low resource settings, plus achieve better health outcomes in the U.S. and around the world.
To achieve delivering test results faster will require a combination of biomedical engineering and clinical expertise. To achieve that goal, the Center for Future Technologies in Cancer Care (CFTCC) www.bu.edu/cftcc was launched at Boston University (BU) www.bu.edu in 2012 with a five year $10 million grant from NIH www.nih.gov.
CFTCC identifies prototypes and provides early clinical assessments of innovative Point-of-Care (POC) technologies designed to treat, screen, diagnose, and monitor cancers. CFTCC is largely a virtual center supporting researchers in the development and clinical assessment of emerging POC technologies and trains clinicians and other potential stakeholders in their use.
One of the devices developed is a noninvasive optical device to monitor the effectiveness of chemotherapy at the POC for breast cancer patients. The patient can either wear the device or it can be used as a handheld by a clinician. The tumor-tracking imaging pad developed by Assistant Professor Darren Roblyer, is capable of transmitting near-infrared light to penetrate deep inside cancer tissue.
At that point, based on the tumor-tracking imaging pad’s continuous optical measurements of the absorption and scattering of light within a tumor, a clinician in real-time is able to determine rapid changes in the tumor’s structure and metabolism that could indicate resistance to current treatments.
Another CFTCC funded projects is the Personal Health Network, a mobile app to enable cancer patients and their family member to communicate more effectively with care coordination nurses, oncologists, and other specialists.
Another project is being headed by Dr. Katherine Kim, Assistant Professor at the University of California-Davis http://ucdavis.edu in collaboration with Tiatros http://home.Tiatros.com, a digital health technology company based in San Francisco. Once logged into the network, patients can interact with health providers through video chat, email, and view plans of care, appointment schedules, plus look at medical and self-management information.
To carry out research, the University of Texas at Austin www.utexas.edu, Biochemistry Professor Andrew Ellington and BU School of Medicine Professor and Chair of Dermatology, Dr. Rhoda Alani, used their CFTCC grant to develop an integrated microfluidic platform to test for cancer biomarkers along with a handheld electronic reader to wirelessly transmit test results. Ellington and Alani aim to transition molecular diagnostic testing to the POC setting.