PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 4-Nov-2014 Contact: Herb Booth hbooth@uta.edu 817-272-7075 University of Texas at Arlington @utarlington A UT Arlington bioengineering professor is using tissue-engineered artificial lymph nodes to attract prostate cancer cells to better target and eradicate the disease. Liping Tang, bioengineering professor and interim chair of the Bioengineering Department, has received a $533,650 U.S. Army grant to build the lymph nodes that attract the cancer cells. "The tissue-engineered lymph nodes can be made to resemble what the cancer will look like after it spreads to other sites," Tang said. "When prostate cancer metastasizes, that's when it becomes dangerous and deadly. This research tries to stop the cancer before it spreads. We attract the cancer with these decoys. Then, when it's trapped, we can use a more targeted radiation." Tang said his team has built the artificial lymph nodes out of biodegradable polymers. "Through the attraction of these prostate cancer cells, we can then identify the way the cancer moves," Tang said. "These artificial lymph nodes will then become an important tool in identifying the critical biological signals that help the cancer migrate throughout the body." Eventually, Tang believes his research will allow patients to live longer cancer-free. He said the … Continue reading →

Before Google started work on a pill that aims to detect cancers and other diseases by sending magnetic nanoparticles into your bloodstream, it talked to Sam Gambhir. Gambhir is a professor of radiology, bioengineering, and materials science at Stanford University and the director of the universitys Canary Center for Cancer Early Detectiona researcher at the forefront of a movement that seeks to identify cancers far sooner than we do today. Googlers Andrew Conrad and Vik Bajaj approached him about a year and a half ago, not long after the company hired Conrad to oversee a new health sciences effort inside Google X, its moonshot research lab. Basically, Gambhir says, they wanted recommendations on what moonshots they should try for. And as Google built up its health operations, he continued to consult with the company and the health sciences lab it now runs in Silicon Valley. One of the projects Google eventually settled on was what Conrad calls the Nanoparticle Platform, an effort to build a cancer-detecting pill, publicly revealed last week. The idea is that this pill will contain magnetic nanoparticles that can latch onto certain cancer-related molecules in the bloodstreamand that a wearable device could then use magnetic properties … Continue reading →