Collaborative Research: Modeling and Control of Magnetic Chemotherapy

这项合作研究奖的目的是改善化疗药物对其目标肿瘤的输送。在现有的化疗中，据估计，只有不到0.1%的给药药物被肿瘤吸收，剩下的99.9%用于健康组织，并造成严重的威胁生命的副作用。在磁性药物靶向中，化疗可以附着在生物相容的磁性颗粒上。这使得可以对药物进行磁控--放置在患者外部的磁铁可能被用来将治疗重点放在肿瘤上。要做到这一点很困难。人体是复杂的，目前还不清楚如何启动磁铁(何时打开和关闭)以最好地将药物导向肿瘤。该项目的目标是开发复杂的、经过实验验证的工具，以更好地了解磁化化疗如何在体内移动，并在此基础上开发出以最佳方式启动磁铁的方法，以更好地将化疗导向肿瘤。如果成功，更广泛的影响将是一套改进磁性药物靶向的技术--潜在地将其从只能将药物集中于单个浅层肿瘤的方法，转变为可以访问深层肿瘤以及扩散到全身的小而血运不良的转移肿瘤的方法。这个项目是癌症临床医生、工程师和数学家之间的合作努力，也将通过培训学生在这三个领域的交叉点有效地工作，在很大程度上使这些领域更加紧密。高中生、本科生和研究生将参与这项研究，并每周与医生、工程师和数学家互动。

The objective of this collaborative research award is to improve the delivery of chemotherapy drugs to its target tumors. With existing chemotherapy, it is estimated that less than 0.1 percent of the administered drugs are taken up by the tumor, the remaining 99.9 percent go to healthy tissue and cause severe and life-threatening side-effects. In magnetic drug targeting, chemotherapy can be attached to biocompatible magnetic particles. This allows magnetic control of the drugs - magnets placed outside the patient can potentially be used to focus the therapy to tumors. Doing so is difficult. The human body is complex and it is not yet understood how to actuate the magnets (when to turn them on and off) to best direct the drugs to the tumors. The goal of this project is to develop sophisticated and experimentally-validated tools to better understand how magnetized chemotherapy moves through the body, and based on these to develop methods to optimally actuate the magnets to better direct the chemotherapy to tumors.If successful, the broader impact will be a suite of techniques to improve magnetic drug targeting - potentially moving it from a method that could only focus drugs to single shallow tumors, to one that could access deep tumors as well as small and poorly vascularized metastatic tumors spread throughout the body. This project is a collaborative effort between cancer clinicians, engineers, and mathematicians, and will also serve to bring these fields closer together in major part by training students to work effectively at the intersection of these three areas. High school, undergraduate, and graduate students will be involved in the research, and will interact with doctors, engineers, and mathematicians on a weekly basis.