Rice University , MD Anderson lead research team developing affordable system for immediate digital pathology of tumors during surgery HOUSTON , Aug. 13, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- A Rice University -led multi-institutional research collaboration has won an award of up to $18 million over five years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop and validate a new system for improving tumor removal accuracy for two types of cancer: breast, and head and neck cancer. Called AccessPath, the novel, affordable, slide-free cancer pathology system will help surgeons know whether they have completely removed tumors during surgery by enabling rapid, automatic tumor margin classification of resected tumors.
AccessPath is one of several projects funded through the ARPA-H Precision Surgical Interventions program announced today as part of a broader $150 million Biden-Harris administration Cancer Moonshot initiative. "Because of its low cost, high speed, and automated analysis, we believe AccessPath can revolutionize real-time surgical guidance, greatly expanding the range of hospitals able to provide accurate intraoperative tumor margin assessment and improving outcomes for all cancer surgery patients," said Rebecca Richards-Kortum , a Rice bioengineering professor and director of the Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies who is the lead PI on the project. Ashok Veeraraghavan , chair of Rice's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a profess.