Despite the recession, Cornell’s cancer research has recently received a boost of $14 million. This funding will enable the establishment of a new Center on the Microenvironment and Metastasis, in which Cornell researchers in Ithaca will partner with clinicians and scientists at New York City’s Weill Cornell Medical College.

The researchers competed for a five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute and received $13 million. They also received $1 million as part of the Obama administration’s recent stimulus package, which will help fund one piece of the project.

The center will bring together 26 researchers from the physical and biological sciences to use nanobiotechnology as a means to advance understanding of how cancer cells metastasize, or reproduce themselves. The center will be part of a network of 12 centers throughout the United States working on similar projects, and researchers from each center will meet every year to review their findings at a conference.

“We’re trying to get much more detailed control and understanding over cellular micro-environments using materials to measure … physical properties at the micro- and nano-scale,” said Prof. Harold Craighead Ph.D. ’80, engineering, who directs the Nanobiotechnology Center at Cornell and will lead the new center. “Our hope is to bring the perspective of physical scientists and engineers to bear on cancer research. Traditional cancer researchers have a set of methods that they’ve been using, and part of the intent of the whole network of centers is to have new concepts brought to bear.”

The Cornell center will utilize nanotechnology to examine artificial models of the tumor environment. The research will focus on how tumors work, how cancer progresses and how cells operate and respond in this environment.

“What we’re bringing to bear are our strengths here at Cornell, our capability to look in greater detail and use our high resolution capabilities to get a better picture to look at what’s happening at this scale, which hasn’t been widely studied before,” Craighead said.

The four overall themes that network of centers will pursue include the physics, evolution, information coding-decoding and better understanding of cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute website.

Dr. Barbara Hempstead, who is the senior co-investigator of the research center, coordinating scientists and clinicians, said her part of the project will examine the reasons behind a cancer cell’s metastasis.

“The overarching goal of this whole network of centers is to bring an entirely new class of researchers into trying to decipher cancer,” she said.

The center at Cornell will have three main projects. The first will create artificial tumors to further the understanding of how cancer replicates itself by communicating with surrounding cells.

“My lab is applying engineering tools to understand cancer,” said Prof. Claudia Fischbach-Teschel, biomedical engineering, who co-leads this project.

She added: “Cancer right now is the second leading cause of death in the United States, anticipated to become the leading cause of death, taking over cardiovascular diseases within a few years. There’s very important implications in that and I was interested in contributing to the field and bringing new tools to the field will help me understand what’s going on.”

The second project, co-led by Prof. Cynthia Reinhart-King, biomedical engineering, will study how cells from a tumor break away and travel to find a new site elsewhere in the body to grow more tumors, the process which usually kills cancer patients.

“There’s no test you can run to predict metastasis. One of the goals we have is to look at the environment around tumors that make tumors more likely to metastasize,” Reinhart-King said.

The third project will study how tumor cells travel through the bloodstream en route to new tumor sites. Prof. Michael King, biomedical engineering, who co-leads the project, stressed its importance.

“90 percent of all cancer death is due to metastasis, due to new tumors distant from a primary tumor. One of the main ways that cancer spreads is through the bloodstream. Cancer cells will often leave a primary tumor, migrate through the tissue and go to a blood vessel, and from there the tumor has access to the whole body through circulation. We’re studying how they interact with the walls of blood vessels, how they stick and attach,” King said.

Cornell has unique facilities to use as a resource in this type of research, specifically nanofabrication facilities and extensive lab facilities.

“The strength of what Cornell’s trying to do which differs from rest of the centers is that we’re bringing to bear a lot of tools from nano- and micro-fabrication which aren’t available elsewhere,” Reinhart-King said.

Fischbach-Teschel underscored the newness and importance of this approach to cancer research. She said: “By bringing together the expertise of all of these different fields, we can begin to think about cancer in a completely different way.”

Hempstead agreed: “This is an incredibly exciting opportunity for Cornell on both campuses. Both sites are part of Cornell University but this was an extremely important funding mechanism to bring together physical scientists as well as clinicians and biologists here at Weill. It pulled us out of our comfort zone.”

The researchers are hopeful that their endeavors will make new discoveries that will help cure cancer. “We just hope that this will have an impact on cancer. Everyone in each center is hopeful that this will make a significant impact on this disease,” Craighead said.