Nov 19 2015
Cleveland has developed into a national leader for medical imaging, which is playing an ever-increasing role in medical diagnostics and research. Ten years ago, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and University Hospitals Case Medical Center began assembling a team of researchers and imaging infrastructure with the goal of enabling faculty to make new discoveries and translate these to patients.
This center, called the Case Center for Imaging Research (CCIR), examines structures spanning the spectrum from molecules to humans and has made significant contributions to research in cancer, cardiovascular diseases, orthopedic disorders, neurological diseases, genetics, drug addiction, and other disciplines.
In a survey taken a few years ago, doctors were asked what the number one development of the past 25 years was that most significantly impacted their ability to care for their patients. The number one and two responses were MRI and CT imaging. Imaging has only grown since that survey and new technologies are coming on line almost every day.
“CCIR is a unique imaging research center unlike any in the United States, because it integrates physicians and scientists allowing them to solve unmet clinical needs,” said James Basilion, PhD, director of the CCIR and professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve. “CCIR seeks to advance medicine through imaging science. The rapidly growing field of biomedical imaging enables us to visualize physiological structures, measure biological functions and evaluate cellular and molecular events without requiring invasive procedures,” said Dr. Basilion, who took over the reins of the center this past year from former director Jeffrey Duerk, PhD, now Dean of the Case School of Engineering and one of CCIR’s founders.
CCIR has become an essential component of several collaborative centers across Case Western Reserve and UH Case Medical Center’s campuses, including the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative, and Digestive Diseases Research Core. CCIR is comprised of about 25 faculty from diverse fields.
In 2006, three powerful, extremely large bio-imaging instruments or magnets, one weighing 40 tons, 8 ft. in diameter and 10 ft. long, the other two a “mere” 4 tons each, 6 ft. in diameter and 5 ft. long, were lowered with a crane through a hole into the basement of Lerner Tower for the CCIR. The center has continued to grow by adding several new pieces of imaging equipment including an entire suite of non-invasive optical imaging tools and a recently completed the build out of a cGMP radionucleid (a cellular regulator) facility development to translate its preclinical nuclear efforts to patients.
Initially the center was supported through Case Western Reserve and UH, and had secured approximately $24 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, Office of National Drug Control Policy, State of Ohio’s Biomedical Research and Technology Trust Fund, Ohio Wright Center of Innovation Awards, and Ohio’s Hayes Investment Awards.
Since its opening, CCIR’s faculty members have earned more than $60 million in research grants and have enabled another $241.2 million of supported research across the university and the medical center.
CCIR’s mission is to advance medicine through imaging science and the vision for CCIR is to be a leader in creating innovative and relevant imaging technologies that will transform the future of patient care, said Dr. Basilion.
“On both counts, the Center has succeeded,” he said.
There has been a significant return on investment including 163 patents filed from CCIR faculty and many of the discoveries have been or are being translated to patients around the world. About 100 of the patents are licensed and have generated over a million dollars to date.
Recent discoveries from center faculty include the work of the MRI group that developed technology for an extremely fast MRI scan using multidetector imaging. This scan can produce multi-dimensional measurements of a patient’s tissue quantitatively showing the difference between muscle, fat, gray matter and white matter. The approach is being refined to detect specific cancers noninvasively and earlier and can be applied to other diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
Other faculty have used imaging to develop nanomedicines that are 50 times better than current technologies or for stimulating the body’s immune system to fight off cancer. Nanomedicines use nanotechnology which is on the atomic or subatomic scale and provides the possibility of delivering drugs or antigens to specific cells using nanoparticles.
A third example is the creation of technology for optical imaging probes to distinguish between a tumor and normal surrounding tissues during surgical procedures such as lumpectomy. This technology will reduce the number of patients that need to return for more surgery because not all the cancer was removed during the first surgical resection. For lumpectomy the return rate is approximately 40 percent.
These research endeavors have also caught the interest of many foundations including the Komen Foundation and the Prayers from Maria Children’s Glioma Cancer Foundation. The latter has funded the development of the novel drug delivery system to combat childhood brain tumors.
On Nov. 19, the CCIR will celebrate its history and future with a symposium highlighting key technological advances from its faculty, a poster session of collaborative projects, and a key note address.
The symposium will be held 1:30 – 5:30 p.m. in the Wolstein Research Building. The keynote speaker will be David Piwnica-Worms, MD, PhD, the Gerald Dewey Dodd, Jr., Endowed Distinguished Chair in Diagnostic Imaging, Division of Diagnostic Imaging at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He will speak about Tumor Heterogeneity and the Challenges of Molecular Imaging.
Other speakers include Pamela B. Davis, MD, PhD, Dean, Case Western Reserve School of Medicine; Pablo R. Ros, MD, MPH, PhD, the Castele University Professor and Chair, Department of Radiology at Case Western Reserve and UH Case Medical Center; Dr. Duerk, on the center’s history; Dr. Basilion on its future; Nicole Steinmetz, PhD, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Radiology; Mark Griswold, PhD, the Thomas F. Peterson, Jr. Professor of MRI Innovation, Professor of Radiology, Physics, Biomedical Engineering, EECS; Dave Wilson, PhD, the Robert J. Herbold Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Radiology, and Norbert Avril, MD, Professor of Radiology.
For more information about the symposium, contact: Dr. Kerry Grimberg, [email protected]