Friday, March 29, 2024 Mar 29, 2024
58° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
News

UT Southwestern Announces Early Collaborative Grants for Heavy Ion Project With UTA

UT Southwestern Medical Center is enlisting the help of a UT Arlington professor Dr. Mingwu Jin to bolster their effort to become the first heavy ion cancer treatment center in the United States. Jin, a physics professor with a background in electrical imaging and radiology, hopes to develop an imaging system that will help doctors see how each treatment is affecting a patient in real time, making it easier to adjust the dosage as needed.
By Chase Beakley |

UT Southwestern Medical Center is enlisting the help of UT Arlington professor Dr. Mingwu Jin to bolster its effort to launch the first heavy ion cancer treatment center in the United States. Jin, a physics professor with a background in electrical engineering and radiology, hopes to develop an imaging system that will help doctors see how each cancer treatment is affecting a patient in real time, making it easier to adjust the dosage as needed.

UT Southwestern was one of two in the nation to win $1 million planning grants from the National Institutes of Health to help pay for a National Particle Therapy Research Center. Jin will receive $100,000 from that pool. (He also received $153,543 from the National Institutes of Health for a separate project to help improve the accuracy of real-time imaging during cancer treatment.)

The center itself will likely cost $200 million—$130 million for the technology and $70 million for the building—and be operated by a consortium of academic health systems throughout the state. As such, it will need help with funding from local, state, and federal sources. The Heavy Ion Center will house an enormous machine that sends dense carbon ions directly into tumors and cancer cells with unprecedented accuracy. Active centers in other countries have significantly increased patient outcomes, particularly for difficult to treat cancers like pancreatic. In Japan, pancreatic cancer patients saw one-year survival rate go from 40 percent to 74 percent. Two year rates jumped from 17 percent to 54 percent.

Accuracy and dosage are critical with heavy ion cancer therapies because the stakes are higher in almost every sense, Jin says.

“Heavy ion cancer therapies are an option for terminal cancer where conventional radiation is not effective, but delivery of the therapy has to be more precise as the radiation levels are much higher,” says Jin.

Patients undergoing heavy ion therapy have usually exhausted other treatment options and higher levels of radiation give doctors a slimmer margin for error. Slight differences in patient anatomy can make the treatments hard to administer and the high radiation can wreak havoc on healthy tissue exposed to the treatment.

The first step in solving this problem is to develop a computer algorithm that simulates the effects of heavy ion radiation on tissue, which will take about two years. To do so, Jin will collaborate with Dr. Xun Jia of UT Southwestern to try to establish a correlation between heavy ion dosage and what’s known as prompt gamma, a byproduct emitted when carbon ions interact with body tissue. A prompt gamma imaging system will be designed and tested using simulations and physical phantom experiments. Then, pending positive results, the imaging system could be ready for real patient trials by 2021, the year that UT Southwestern plans to open its heavy ion therapy center.

Jia emphasized that collaboration is necessary to solve complex problems like this one.

“This is such a big project and contains a lot of technically challenging components, which require collaborative efforts to overcome challenges and develop novel techniques to eventually bring this important therapeutic form to the patients,” he said.

Jia also hinted at further collaboration between the two organizations in the future: “There should be many other collaborations between UTSW and UTA faculties, because the two campus are both in DFW area. As far as I know, even in our department, a few other [faculty members] are working with UTA professors on several projects.”

Now that the project has been announced, both professors are ready to start. “I am very excited to tackle the challenging problem of real-time dose monitoring of heavy ion therapy, which is one of the frontiers of the cancer therapy,” said Jin.

Related Articles

Image
Arts & Entertainment

Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: March 28-31

It's going to be a gorgeous weekend. Pencil in some live music in between those egg hunts and brunches.
Image
Arts & Entertainment

Arlington Museum of Art Debuts Two Must-See Nature-Inspired Additions

The chill of the Arctic Circle and a futuristic digital archive mark the grand opening of the Arlington Museum of Art’s new location.
By Brett Grega
Image
Arts & Entertainment

An Award-Winning SXSW Short Gave a Dallas Filmmaker an Outlet for Her Grief

Sara Nimeh balances humor and poignancy in a coming-of-age drama inspired by her childhood memories.
By Todd Jorgenson
Advertisement