A Johns Hopkins Engineering-led team has won an award of up to $20.9 million over five years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop novel technologies for precise tumor removal. ARPA-H is a federal funding agency established by the Biden-Harris administration to rapidly advance high-impact biomedical research centered around preventing, detecting, and treating cancer and other diseases.
Using its ARPA-H award, the team, led by Emad Boctor of the Whiting School of Engineering and including collaborators from Johns Hopkins’ schools of Engineering and Medicine, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, and industry will develop a novel, non-contact photoacoustic endoscope that promises to provide an information-enhanced view of the surgical field without altering surgeons’ workflows. When used with the team’s proposed multi-cancer fluorescent contrast agent, the endoscope will help surgeons identify and remove any remaining microscopic cancer remnants during tumor removal procedures.