A Medical Device Daily

Moffitt Cancer Center (Tampa, Florida) said it has been awarded nearly $19 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, including a prestigious Grand Opportunities grant to study patient-centered outcomes research. Moffitt was also selected by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) as one of 12 institutions nationwide to serve as Physical Science-Oncology Centers to advance the use of physics, mathematics and related disciplines to study the development of cancer.

"Moffitt is making the most of every opportunity to leverage our country's investments in medical research to benefit people battling cancer," said William Dalton, MD, PhD, center director and CEO of Moffitt. "Funding from the Recovery Act allows us to move forward more quickly on a variety of fronts, accelerating the process of translating scientific discoveries into more effective patient care."

According to the center, the NCI's establishment of a Physical Science-Oncology Center at Moffitt is recognition of the cancer institute's emergence in the field of integrative mathematical oncology. This program will distribute $22.7 million among 12 grantees this year to fund projects that employ physics, mathematics and other disciplines not traditionally associated with cancer research to achieve a better understanding of the physical laws governing the progression of the disease, Moffitt said.

The other 11 institutions named as Physical Science-Oncology Centers are: Arizona State University (Tempe); Cornell University (Ithaca, New York); Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge); Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (New York); Northwestern University (Chicago); Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey); The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, California); University of California-Berkeley; University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

In other grant activity, GE Global Research (Niskayuna, New York), the technology development arm for General Electric (Fairfield, Connecticut), said it has received a $2 million award from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS; Research Triangle Park, North Carolina), part of the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Maryland), to develop wearable RFID sensors to alert people to the presence of environmental chemical agents in the air and sample exhaled breath to serve as an early indicator of disease.

RFID sensors are commonly used to track a wide variety of items, from products in a supply chain to baggage at an airport. GE's sensors are unique in that they combine RFID tracking with an acute gas sensing capability, which can detect the presence of potentially harmful chemical agents in the air. Because these sensors can be made at a size smaller than a penny, they can be part of a typical identification badge and serve as a pre-emptive or early warning for people about the presence of chemical agents in the air.

"We are creating a dynamic sensing platform that will provide real-time information to people about the presence of potentially harmful chemical agents in the air," said Radislav Potyrailo, a principal scientist at GE Global Research who is leading the wearable RFID sensor project. "We are creating a dynamic sensing platform that will provide real-time information to people about the presence of potentially harmful chemical agents in the air."