Cancer Center at Illinois receives Basic Cancer Center designation

The Cancer Center at Illinois recently received a Basic Cancer Center designation by the National Cancer Institute.

The specific designation is the first the institute has given in nearly 40 years. Of the 74 NCI-designated cancer centers, the Champaign-based center is only the eighth to be recognized as a Basic Cancer Center, and the only one in Illinois.

The designation brings multi-year federal support to expand research capacity, deepen collaboration with clinical partners and accelerate the path from lab discovery to real-world application.

“This designation recognizes the unique approach of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to transforming healthcare and is a moment of celebration for our entire community,” said Rohit Bhargava, the Phillip and Ann Sharp Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois. “It affirms the quality of our research and the unwavering commitment of our members to transform how we understand, detect and treat cancer.”

Bhargava recently spoke with Health News Illinois about what’s next for the cancer center and the work that makes it stand out among its national peers.

Edited excerpts below:

HNI: What does this designation mean for you and the Cancer Center at Illinois?

RB: So the designation itself is a grant mechanism that the National Cancer Institute has had out now in its 50-plus years. There are 73 so-called NCI-designated cancer centers. They’re divided into three categories. One is the big comprehensive cancer centers, which means they have research, patient care and public outreach. They’re the ones who tell you to stop smoking, for example. And then there are clinical cancer centers, which primarily focus on providing care and have a research component. And there are basic research centers, of which we are one of them now, that have research enterprises that are pretty significant, comparable in quality and quantity, perhaps to some of the comprehensive cancer centers, but don’t have patient operations, so they can focus on really fundamental breakthroughs in science or, in our case, focus on making new technologies using engineering approaches. So the inclusion of the cancer center to us really means that there’s a certain level of performance that we have achieved that is comparable to a nationally accredited cancer center. It obviously brings a little bit of support from the government, but most importantly, it allows us to collaborate even more easily with other cancer centers, because we are a very unique center in the sense that our motto is ‘discovery to use.’ So we’re really focused on fundamental discovery, but we want it to be useful right in our lifetimes. We don’t want to invent things just for the sake of invention and someone else finds a use. We actually want to build this whole pipeline. So the designation makes it very easy for other cancer centers to collaborate with us. They’re assured of our quality. There are specific forums where only NCI-designated centers participate, so we now have access to those forums. Ultimately, we would like the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to become the technological provider to the entire cancer centers program, because we have that promise, and we have that size.

HNI: What do you think makes the center stand out among others in Illinois and nationally?

RB: A lot of places do research. But imagine if you were in a clinical cancer center, and there were patients that you saw every day, and perhaps many of the researchers were actually practicing clinicians. You tend to focus on very immediate, short-term solutions, because if there’s a patient in distress, you say, ‘Well, if I could get a medicine that even extended their life by one month, that would be great.’ And sometimes those things are easy to do. You can take a drug or a combination of known drugs, and come up with a three-month extension in life. And those are very credible and very useful, obviously, for patients. But that means that we sometimes neglect the very long-term research that might actually provide breakthroughs, not for three months, but could save your life. So, in the pressure to provide solutions that can be immediately adopted, sometimes we cannot take a chance on these long-term, perhaps more risky but potentially higher payoff approaches. So in my opinion, both these kinds of research are needed in the nation, but we saw a gap in the last 40 years, which was approximately when the last Basic Cancer Center was designated by the NIH. You’ve noticed how everything around us has changed in terms of technology. There was no internet 40 years ago that was accessible. Cell phones were not a thing. So a lot of the technological revolution that has come about in society has not been harnessed for cancer care, and has not been harnessed in a way that can actually reduce costs and make it more accessible. So we think that by bringing engineers from the ground up to address some of the cancer problems in front of us, that future can be realized where we have improved technology that’s actually useful, tuned to the patient’s needs and actually decreasing costs as we go on. And that focus makes us unique in the country. No one else has that focus, and no one else has that engineering capacity to be able to address problems at scale.

HNI: What are some of the notable projects you and your team have been involved in?

RB: So we’ve divided our center into two big directions. One is to better diagnose and detect cancer, and the second is to better treat cancer. That is as simple as it could be, to find it and then take care of it. So in the first program, we are really focused on inventing technology that helps us characterize cancer, to understand it fundamentally, and then invent new ways of diagnosing. So there are two big things in cancer. One is, how is the architecture? How is cancer organized? And second, what are the molecular drivers? Because at the end of the day, it’s a molecular disease, genes, proteins and so on. So we have two major themes around imaging technology and molecular measurement technology, and tying both of those together, and actually tying all the activities in the center together.

The second program seeks to first understand cancer from a molecular perspective. So it has a lot of biology, which is quite similar to many cancer centers, but then we have very unique chemistry capabilities. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a chemistry powerhouse, so we’re taking those chemistry capabilities and designing drugs that have never been synthesized before, and nobody can take that approach to designing a large number of molecules. The third part of the second program is actually really interesting. We want to bridge the gap between laboratory proof of concept and human use, and we think that period is far too long right now. So one approach that we’ve taken is to make designer tumors in the lab. So imagine cells coming from a patient, and you can make 100 or 1,000 copies of those tumors in the lab, and you can test out drugs. So that’s an intermediate testing point. Another really great point for us here is that we have a very strong veterinary school, so people whose pets, cats and dogs, come in to get treated, we can offer them these new medicines that are perhaps more effective if they are proven, then obviously that speeds up the translation to humans.

HNI: You’re the first center in Illinois to receive the designation. What does that mean for the state?

RB: It’s a tough time for research funding, and it’s very, very clear that cancer research saves lives. This is indisputable at this point. Compared to, say, 25 years ago, almost one-third of cancer patients today are alive because there have been breakthroughs in research. So this is a well-documented history, and we are really approaching a time where the sort of easier problems in cancer have been solved. Now there are some really tough and thorny problems, and if we are to make tremendous progress in cancer, somebody has to take the lead in addressing these and addressing them in a way that’s tractable, in a way that’s efficient and so on. But at the same time, we’re seeing a stagnation, or perhaps even a decrease, in the research. So I’m really delighted that we are able to organize this effort and that we were able to obtain funding in this environment, and that happened in the state of Illinois, which is well-known for tremendous technological prowess in the past, some of the great universities in the nation and obviously a great workforce here. So hopefully we can take all those advantages and combine them and actually make Illinois a leader in technology- driven healthcare. I think that’s a real opportunity that we have in front of us. So this could mean a lot to the state if we were able to now leverage it, get it supported and do the scope of research that we’re interested in doing.

HNI: What’s next for the center?

RB: Many people think the designation is sort of a goal, but in our opinion, it’s just a milestone. And actually, the most important part about the designation is that it assures you that you are following the best practices that have been discovered in the last 50 years on how to build a great and effective cancer center. So we got a fantastic score by the review committee, and we think we’ve followed all the best practices to build a great center. And as you asked, building for what? Well, what we’re trying to do is maybe over the next five years, we’ve set a target for ourselves. Can we bring five technologies and five drugs to use? And each one of these would be, hopefully, if we can achieve them, dramatically different. For example, some of our colleagues in my lab are inventing new imaging technologies that use the chemistry of the tissue and use artificial intelligence to diagnose cancer more precisely, perhaps even at the level of a single human. So imagine having a personalized report when somebody is diagnosed with cancer, and it tells them, ‘Well, if you’d make this choice in therapy, it’ll probably be better because of the following reason.” And we can use all the information at our fingertips. So those kinds of things, I think, are where we’re excited to go forward on.