Stanford has been awarded a $20 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to be paid out over the next five years to integrate nanotechnology into cancer research. The goal is to use nanoscale devices — which can be as small as one-ten thousandth of a cross-section of human hair — that can slip into living cancer cells to detect, monitor and treat cancer.

Professors involved in the project believe Stanford was chosen due to its history of strong research in the areas of nanotechnology, cancer biology and cancer imaging. Stanford’s multidisciplinary approach to the venture also made the University a prime candidate because of its unique expertise in the Schools of Medicine, Engineering and Humanities and Sciences.

“I am very excited that we have been given the funding to pursue what I hope will lead to many new translational discoveries in the field of cancer,” said project director, Radiology Prof. Sanjiv Sam Gambhir and director the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford. “This is also a great time, as Stanford is in the process of becoming an NIH-funded comprehensive cancer center.”

The Stanford Medical School will now house one of eight national Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence. This is to be a broad research alliance among cancer centers, medical institutions, schools of engineering and physical sciences, nonprofit organizations and private corporations, according to Gambhir.

“This is the first project bringing together medical faculty and science and engineering faculty,” said Robert Sinclair, a professor in materials science and engineering, who is also involved in the project. “It’s a really terrific development and I think our team can make a significant contribution to cancer diagnosis and treatment.”

The Clark Center and the Bio-X program will be key components of the team’s efforts, in addition to collaboration with the project’s industrial partners, GE and Intel. Graduate students and post-doctoral students are also expected to be involved in the research and will help to bridge the labs involved in the projects, Gambhir said.

“We have as a key goal to train the next generation of scientists that can bridge quite different fields in order to tackle and solve important problems such as cancer,” he added.

According to Gambhir, since the other seven centers each received $15 to $20 million, Stanford got one of the highest, if not the highest, sum. Sinclair believes that the National Cancer Institute is trying to bring together different ways of thinking about early cancer research in this multidisciplinary project.

Technically speaking, the center aims to develop nanotechnologies that can very accurately determine low levels of proteins in a patient’s blood before and after cancer therapy, which tells if the patient is responding to the given therapy. An additional goal is to link these types of in vitro diagnostics to in vivo molecular imaging with nano-particles that are injected into a subject to visualize cancer and response to therapy.

“This will allow many new possibilities in both novel therapies and diagnostics allowing the study of cancer and management of cancer in a way not previously possible,” Gambhir said.