Industry-Academic Partnerships for Development of Biomedical Imaging Systems and Methods that Are Cancer-Specific

Contact: Guoying Liu, Ph.D. 301-594-5220, liug@mail.nih.gov

The initiative fosters partnerships between academic researchers and industry by providing two-year “seed” grants for collaborative in vivo imaging research and for projects to help validate new approaches to improve early detection, screening, diagnosis, image-guided interventions, and assessment of response to therapy.

Because most clinical imaging work depends on commercially available imaging devices, CIP aims to ensure that commercial technology developers have access to the expertise of academic researchers. These partnerships help to ensure that new platforms and projects are robust and mature, making it more likely that the innovations will be incorporated into NCI and privately funded clinical trials and clinical investigations. By supporting high-risk/high-reward projects, grants in this program support new uses or devices for imaging that industry would not otherwise explore.

About 10 partnerships were funded under a program announcement PAR-03-157, which closed in November 2004. One partnership is addressing the use of sonography to visualize lymph nodes, and another is testing a type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) known as magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) to noninvasively look at changes in the chemical composition of tumor tissues and thus monitor the effectiveness of radiation treatment. These two projects involve existing technologies that have not been validated for use on these particular oncology problems.

Because of its success, CIP issued a new announcement in 2006 that will give successful partnerships five years to build on their collaborations. New projects will include creation of a research network to address such issues as how to measure drug response using noninvasive imaging methods.