Individuals across Northwestern are coming together to further cancer research thanks to a five-year, $13.6 million grant awarded by the National Cancer Institute. The result of this interdisciplinary collaboration will be a Physical Sciences-Oncology center (PS-OC) that brings new models and perspectives to the study of cancer.
Northwestern, one of 12 institutions to receive a grant from the NCI, will focus its efforts on the specific goal of advancing understanding of the role of gene expression in cancer. But the grant also calls specifically for an interdisciplinary style of research in order to reach this goal, a type of research uniquely suited to Northwestern because of the its breadth and variety of undergraduate and graduate science studies. The university will call on professors, students and researchers in Weinberg, McCormick, Feinberg and several other programs to approach the research with their own unique lenses and to collaborate with people in other disciplines.
The center will especially aim to bring the methods and perspectives of physical science to the study of cancer.
“Building on stunning progress in the molecular sciences and advanced technologies, we envision the development of new fields of study based on the application of physical sciences approaches to address major questions and barriers in cancer research,” a statement on the NCI Web site.
Two research programs already in place, the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Institute will administer the PS-OC. But applied mathematicians, oncologists, physical scientists, molecular biologists, and even professors and students will all contribute.
The McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences currently has eight professors participating in research for the PS-OC. William Kath, a professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics, will be investigating different states of gene expression in DNA.
Thomas O’Halloran, a professor of chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology in the Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences, will be conducting research about how normal cells condense chromatin in cell division, and how that affects cancer.
“It’s very cross-disciplinary. [...] In the long run, we may even be collaborating with people in the School of Education [and Social Policy],” said O’Halloran, also Associate Director for Basic Sciences at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center and director of the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute.
The PS-OC will take the inclusion of disciplines and schools to a new level with an education and outreach program. Summer boot camps and workshops will bring medical students from Feinberg to the Evanston campus and graduate students and post-docs affiliated with the physical sciences to the medical campus.
“The education program focuses on exchanging tool sets and paradigms between oncologists, biologists and physical scientists so that they can learn from each other and encourage the next generation of researchers,” said Sheila Judge, the director of Operation and Outreach at the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute.
Northwestern’s ability to do cross-disciplinary research lies mostly in the variety of resources and programs already in place, Licht said.
“Northwestern has so many strengths in so many physical and biological sciences under one institution. Many other PS-OC institutions are collaborations, like Princeton and the California Institute of Technology, but ours is fully contained in Northwestern.”