The Center for Interventional Oncology (CIO)
(http://www.cc.nih.gov/centerio/index.html) offers new and expanded opportunities to investigate cancer therapies that use imaging technology to diagnose and treat localized cancers in ways that are precisely targeted and minimally- or non-invasive. The Center for Interventional Oncology (CIO), under the leadership of Dr. Bradford Wood, has pioneered various technologies and procedures using mini-GPS for the human body to combine cutting-edge magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT), cone beam CT and ultrasound to navigate a diagnostic and/or therapeutic device through the body. Students working at the CIO will gain experience in a translational research environment within the NIH Clinical Center (CC). The CIO is looking for motivated students for the following project:

Novel drug-device combinations for chemoembolization of solid tumors

Transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) is a minimally invasive
procedure to treat patients with tumors that are not amenable to surgery. For TACE, embolic agents (i.e. materials that block blood flow) and chemotherapy are sequentially delivered into arteries that directly supply blood to a tumor. This project focuses on characterizing a novel drug-device combination consisting of CT image-able, drug-loaded embolic beads for TACE of hepatic tumors. The prospective BESIP student will have the opportunity to develop novel drug-bead combinations and to characterize drug loading and release kinetics. The student may also seek to develop methods to quantify and predict drug and bead accumulation and distribution in liver tumors following TACE based on the assessment of bead density as visualized with CT. Current drugs of interest for tumor localized delivery via combination with embolic beads include chemotherapeutic agents, molecular targeted agents, and immune modulators