February 3, 2022 — Immunotherapies, in which care teams harness and augment patients’ immune systems to battle diseases, have emerged as promising treatments for a range of cancers. Yet their effectiveness remains largely blunted in solid tumors—a roadblock that a group of biomedical engineers and cancer researchers from the University of Minnesota and University of Wisconsin-Madison hope to overcome through a new research collaboration.
Kevin Eliceiri, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and medical physics at UW-Madison, and Paolo Provenzano (PhD BME ’03), an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota, will lead the Center for Multiparametric Imaging of Tumor Immune Microenvironments, funded by a five-year, $6.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute.
The collaboration aims to inform new immunotherapy designs and strategies by developing, testing and deploying an integrated toolkit of imaging and data analysis technologies, shared across institutional lines. By applying advanced optical imaging, nano- and microfabrication and biophysical modeling techniques specifically to solid tumor microenvironments and studying how they influence immune function, Eliceiri hopes the team can unlock new solutions for therapies.
“We’re realizing that the microenvironment matters a lot in cancer invasion and progression,” says Eliceiri, a leader in developing imaging hardware and software for cell biology applications. “So instead of imaging that takes cells out of the natural context and puts them flat on glass, we want to look at environments that are more natural and we want to be more holistic in our imaging, where we track the microenvironment plus all the cell types, not just the cancer cells themselves.”
