Drs. Amanda Kirane and Jennifer Dionne have received funding as one of the Stanford Cancer Institute’s March 2024 SCI Innovation Awards for their project

12/5 Drs. Amanda Kirane and Jennifer Dionne have received funding as one of the Stanford Cancer Institute’s March 2024 SCI Innovation Awards for their project: Label-Free Spatial Profiling of the Tumor Microenvironment for Therapeutic Prediction.

Dr. Kirane and Dionne plan to expand upon current precision medicine cancer treatments that harness the power of the patient’s immune system. In the hopes of identifying which patients will respond to treatment without the most severe adverse effects, the team will study the immune ecosystem in cancer tissues, specifically looking at which proteins are in an activated state.

“We have brought together a unique, cross-disciplinary team in engineering, materials science, machine learning, and tumor immunology with the expertise to explore Dr. Dionne's patented meta-surfaces in the enhancement of Raman spectroscopy to distill the cell surface molecules, tissue cellular makeup, and functional activity of tumors at very high resolution,” said Kirane. “In contrast to available assays in this space, our assay is unique in being a purely optical assay, without requiring antibody-labeling or sequencing technologies that are currently extremely expensive and labor-intensive.”

Kirane says the project aims to accelerate the development of assays into precision tests useable in cancer clinics and will study this approach first in a unique sample of melanoma patients. However, they hope their technique could eventually be applied broadly to all cancer types.