Mayo Clinic and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been awarded a five-year, $9.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to support a Physical Sciences-Oncology Center (PS-OC). Researchers hope to learn more about the physical parameters that limit drug delivery into brain tumors and use this information to build models that will help physicians better predict how the body will distribute a particular drug to brain tumors and help them select the best drug to treat each patient based on their unique tumor.
Mayo Clinic and MIT are among 10 institutions selected to participate in the NCI Physical Sciences-Oncology Network. The network supports innovative ideas that blend perspectives and approaches from the physical sciences, engineering, and cancer research, with the goal of improving the understanding of cancer biology and oncology.
“The most common types of malignant brain tumors — brain metastases originating from cancers outside of the brain, and glioblastoma — have regions that are protected from most drugs,” says co-principal investigator Jann Sarkaria, M.D., of Mayo Clinic. “Low-level drug exposure in these regions can promote drug resistance and that may be why there have been no new effective drug treatments for brain tumors in more than a decade.”
This article originally appeared on the Mayo Clinic News Network.