Soojung Claire Hur, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded a three-year Career Catalyst Research Grant from the Susan G. Komen Foundation to develop a system that will help physicians personalize treatment plans for metastatic breast cancer patients. Hur previously invented a technique that separates live cancer cells from blood, allowing a deep analysis for cancer biomarkers from small samples of blood. Using the grant funding, she plans to engineer a system by which those cells could be used to create models of an individual patient’s tumor. Doctors could then use those models to customize patient treatment plans.